Notes from life, in six essays

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NOTES FROM LIFE.

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NOTES FROM LIFE

IN

SIX ESSAYS.

MONEY.

HUMILITY & INDEPENDENCE.

WISDOM.

BY

CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

CHILDREN.

THE LIFE POETIC.

HENRY TAYLOR,

AUTHOR OF "PHILIP VAN ARTKV

NEW EDITION.

LONDON :
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.

1848.

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LOU DOM:

■ KADBCRT AKD IVAIIB, rBIHTBHI, WBITBIHIABS.

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THE EARL OF ABERDEEN, K.T.,

KTC. KTC. KTC.

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED,

GREAT RESPECT AND REGARD,

THE AUTHOR.

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by Google

P?B^

PREFACE.

In the year 1836 I published a book called
the "Statesman," a title much found fault
with at the time, and in truth not very judi-
ciously chosen. It contained the views and
maxims respecting the transaction of public
business, which twelve years of experience had
suggested to me. But my experience had been
confined within the doors of an oflBice, and
the book was wanting in that general interest
which might possibly have been felt in the
results of a more extensive and varied con-
versancy with public life. Moreover, the sub-
sarcastic vein in which certain parts of it
were written was not very well understood,
and what was meant for an exposure of some

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vm PREFACE.

of the world's ways was, I believe, very
generally mistaken for a recommendation of
them. I advert, now, to this book and its
indiflTerent fortunes, because whatever may
have been its demerits, my present work must
be regarded as to some extent comprehended
in the same design, — ^that, namely, of embody-
ing in the form of maxims and reflections the
immediate results of an attentive observation
of life, — of official life in the former volume,
— of life at large in this. For more than
twenty years I have been in the habit of
noting these results as they were thrown up,
when the facts and occurrences that gave rise
to them were fresh in my mind. A large por-
tion of them I would more willingly have
transfiised into dramatic compositions. Year
after year I have indulged the belief that I
might find health, leisure, and opportunity for
doing so, and I do not yet relinquish the hope
that I may gain the time for further efibrts

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PREFACE. IX

of that nature before I lose the faculty : but
the years wear away, and though I do not
hold that youth is the poet's prime, yet I feel
that after youth the imagination cannot be
put on and taken off with the same easy
versatility, — that a continuous absorption in
the dramatic theme is more indispensable to
its treatment, and that, consequently, such
pursuits come to be less readily combined
with other avocations. Other avocations I
am unable to discard, and lest, therefore, I
should never be in a condition to realise a
better hope, I have put into this prosaic form
such of my reflections on life as I have
thought worthy in one way or another to be
preserved.

MORTLAKB,

November, 1847.

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CONTENTS.

PAGE

MONEY 1

HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE 37

CHOICE IN MARRIAGE 55

WISDOM 95

CHILDREN 116

THE LIFE POETIC 141

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ESSAYS.

OF MONEY.

The philosophy which aflfects to teach us
a contempt of money does not run very deep ;
for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to
the philosopher than it is to ordinary men,
that there are few things in the world of
greater importance. And so manifold are
the bearings of money upon the lives and
characters of mankind, that an insight which
should search out the life of a man in his
pecuniary relations would penetrate into
almost every cranny of his nature. He who
knows, like St. Paul, both how to spare and
how to abound, has a great knowledge : for
if we take account of all the virtues with
which money is mixed up, — ^honesty, justice.

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Z OF MONEY.

generosity, charity, fipugality, forethought,
self-sacrifice, — and of their correlative vices, —
it is a knowledge which goes near to cover
the length and breadth of humanity : and a
right measure and manner in getting, saving,
spending, giving, taking,, lending, borrowing,
and bequeathing, would almost argue a
perfect man.

First : — As to the getting of money. This
involves dangers which do not belong to the
mere possession of it. " Blessed is the rich
that is found without blemish, and hath not
gone after gold," says the Son of Sirach ; and
again, — " He that loveth gold shall not be jus-
tified, and he that foUoweth corruption shall
have enough thereof"* Yet industry must
take an interest in its own fruits ; and God
has appointed that the mass of mankind
shall be moved by this interest, and have
their daily labour sweetened by it ; and
there may be a blessing even upon the going
after gold, if it be not with an inordinate

EcclesiasticuB, xxxi. 8.

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OF MONEY. 3

appetite — ^if the gold be not loved for its own
sake, and if the manner of it be without
blemish. But the danger arises out of the
tendency of the human mind to forget the
end in the means, and the difficulty of
going after gold for the love of the benefits
which it may confer, without going after it
also for the mere love of getting it and keep-
ing it, which is " following corruption." It
behoves him who is getting money, therefore,
even more than him who has it by inherit-
ance, to bear in mind what are the uses of
money, and what are the proportions and
proprieties to be observed in saving, giving,
and spending : for rectitude in the manage-
ment of money consists in the symmetry of
these three.

Sudden and enormous gains almost always
disturb the balance : for a man can scarcely
change his scale suddenly, and yet hold his
proportions : and hence proceeds one of the
many evils of highly-speculative commerce,
with its abrupt vicissitudes of fortune. The
man who engages in it can scarcely have

b2

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4 OF MONEY.

any fixed and regulated manner of dealing
with his net income; he knows not how
much he ought to save, how much he may
permit himself to spend, how much he can
afiford to give : whilst, even if he could
know, the extreme excitements of fear and
hope to which he lies open, occupy his mind
too much for him to give many thoughts to
such matters. And if what is called hold
conunercial enterprise he a thing to he
rejoiced in as promoting the physical well-
being of mankind, and thereby, perhaps, in
the train of consequences, their moral inte-
rests, it is only through that Providence by
which good is brought out of evil. And the
actors in such enterprises, when, as is mostly
the case, they are merely " going after gold,"
and not considering either the physical or
moral results, are, in their own minds and
hearts, " following corruption,'" and are likely
to " have enough thereof."

A moderated and governed course in the
getting of money is the more diflBcult, because
this is, of all pursuits, that in which a man

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of MONEY. 5

meets with the greatest pressure of competi-
tion. So many are putting their hearts into
this work, that he who keeps his out of it, is
not unlikely to fare ill in the strife. And for
this reason it were well for a man, not perhaps
altogether to abate his desire of gain, (though
this should be done if it be excessive), but
more assiduously still to direct his desires
beyond, and purify the desire of gain by
associating with it the desire to accomplish
some scheme of beneficent expenditure. And
let no man imagine that the mere investment
for reproduction, though economists may
justly regard it as beneficial to mankind, will
re-act upon his own heart for good.

Gleorge Herbert is a good counsellor on
this head of money-getting : —

" Yet in thy thriving still misdonbt some evil ;
Lest gaining gain on thee, and make thee dim
To all things else. Wealth is the Conjuror's Devil,

Whom, when he thinks he hath, the Devil hath him.
Gold thou may'st safely touch ; but if it stick
Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick."*

♦ The Church Porch.

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6 OF MONEY.

Secondly: — As to the saving of money.
The saving, like the getting, should be intel-
ligent of a purpose beyond: it should not be
saving for saving's sake, but for the sake of
some worthy object to be accomplished by
the money saved. And especially we are to
guard against that accumulative instinct or
passion which is ready to take possession of
all collectors.

Some very small portion of a man's income
may perhaps be justifiably saved to make
provision against undefined and unforeseen
contingencies, and also to assure himself that
he can save. But in the case of most men
there will be a suflSciency of distinct and
definable ends, whether certain or contingent,
which will not only justify, but enjoin, the
laying by of a proportion of their income. A
young man may very well lay by money to
enable him to be more free in the choice of a
wife. A middle-aged man may lay it by in
order that his old age may have fewer labours
and cares or more comforts. A father may
lay it by for his children. But in all these

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OF MONEY. 7

cases, if the end be not kept steadily in view
from first to last, and the means kept no
more than proportionate and subordinate,
there is the risk that the saver may become a
miser. The young may grow old without
taking a wife, and save still when he no
longer thinks of marrying; or he may think
that what he has saved may entitle him to a
rich wife, rather than enable him to choose.
The middle-aged man may reach old age
with no disposition to increase his comforts
and every disposition to increase his hoard.
And finally, the father, though his motive for
saving is the most natural and universal, and
in general the most warrantable of all, may
yet be betrayed by the very largeness of the
allowance which the world makes in such
cases, into avaricious errors. His case, as
being the most common and that in which
men are least on their guard, deserves to be
the more closely considered.

The prudent parent is less likely to be cor-
rupted into a covetous parent, if he be saving
for several children, than if it be for one

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8 OF MONEY.

only child, or for an eldest son: for avarice
projects itself more readily in the singular
number than in the i)lural ; and saving for a
provision is always to be distinguished from
saving for aggrandisement, which is no other
than a form of avarice. Saving for an only
child or eldest son may be defended when the
father has means beyond the devisable patri-
mony, and when that devisable patrimony is
insufficient for the station to be inherited along
with it. But if the patrimony be insufficient,
and the father have no extrinsic means, he
must not make it more insufficient in his
lifetime, in order that it may be less insuffi-
cient in his son's : he is not to be niggardly
in order that his son may be liberal. He may
indeed retrench in matters connected with
the keeping up of appearances — ^that is, he
may ostensibly retire from his station for a
time, or for life; but he must not, whilst
keeping up the appearances of his station,
fall short in matters of bounty and liberality.
In saving for younger children, the parent
has to consider what is a competency; and if

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OF MONEY* 9

he be wise, and can count upon ah average
share of health and abilities in his younger
sons, he will not relieve them from the neces-
sity of earning the main part of their liveli-
hood ; for unless a man's property be large
enough to find him an occupation in the
management of it and in the discharge of the
duties incident to it, (which generally speak-
ing can only be the case of the eldest son,) it
will be essential to his happiness that he
should have to work for his bread. And it
is on this fact that the custom of succession
according to primogeniture is to be defended ;
for if any one is sacrificed by this custom, it
is rather the eldest than the younger sons ;
the eldest being too often pampered into self-
love, — ^the most wretched inheritance of all,
— ^the younger being trained in self-sacrifice,
fortified in self-reliance, and through industry
and progress leading a wiser, a better, a more
generous, and a happier life.

How much to save for a daughter is another
question; and since a woman's life for the
most part turns upon her marriage, it is her
b3

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10 OF MONEY.

matrimonial prospects which are principally to
be regarded. Let not her wealth be too tempt-
ing: an heiress has a large assortment of suit-
ors, and yet an ill choice: and do not, if you
can help it, let her poverty be an obstruction ;
for prudent men make good husbands, and in
many cases a man cannot marry with pru-
dence where there is not the fair facility of a
moderate fortune. I have heard, indeed, of
a father who stinted his daughters' dowries
on purpose that poor men might not be able
to marry them ; whence he inferred that rich
men would. He might be mistaken in his
inference ; for though rich men can afford to
marry poor maids, yet men are not found to
wish less for money because they want it less,
and in the making of marriages it is gene-
rally seen that "wealth will after kind."
Even if he were not mistaken, however, the
calculation was but a sordid one at the best ;
and considering how many requisites must be
combined to make a good husband and a
happy marriage, the father is likely to impose
a cruel limitation of choice who needlessly

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OF MONEY- 11

adds wealth to the number of essentials.
Even the marriage which is poor through an
improvident choice, is less likely to end ill
than that which is rich through a constrained
choice.

There is yet another domestic object which
may be a fair ground for saving out of a
patrimony. One of the incidents of the law
and custom of primogeniture to which our
natural feelings are the least easily recon-
ciled, is the effect of it upon the wife and
mother when she passes into widowhood.
She is deposed from her station and deprived
of her affluence at the moment of her greatest
domestic calamity, and her own child is the
person to whom they are transferred. It
may be that the cares, duties and responsi-
bilities of a large property and a high pro-
prietary station, are not suitable to a widow
in the decline of life : but this is not left for
hw to determine, and very frequently the still
less acceptable cares of a straitened income
and a total change in her mode of life are
fixed upon her. The force of custom has

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12 OP MONEY*

brought the feelings of mankind into more
accordance than one would have thought
possible with so unnatural an arrangement ;
but the husband needs not to be charged with
parsimony who should save money with a
view to mitigate the fixture contrast between
his wife's position and his widow's.

Thirdly: — As to the spending of money.

The art of living easily as to money, is to
pitch your scale of living one degree below
your means. Comfort and enjoyment are
more dependent upon easiness in the detail of
expenditure, than upon one degree's difference
in the scale.

Guard against false associations of pleasure
with expenditure, — ^the notion that because
pleasure can be purchased with money, there-
fore money cannot be spent without enjoy-
ment. What a thing costs a man is no true
measure of what it is worth to him ; and yet
how often is his appreciation governed by no
other standard, as if there were a pleasure in
expenditiu-e per se.

Let yourself feel a want before you provide

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OP MONEY. 13

against it You are more assured that it is
a real want ; and it is worth while to feel it
a little, in order to feel the relief from it-

When you are undecided as to which of
two courses you would like best, choose the
cheapest. This rule will not only save
money, but save also a good deal of trifling
indecision.

Too much leisure leads to expense ; because
when a man is in want of objects, it occurs
to him that they are to be had for money ;
and he invents expenditures in order to pass
the time.

A thoroughly conscientious mode of regu-
lating expenditure implies much care and
trouble in resisting imposition, detecting
fraud, preventing waste, and doing what in
you lies to guard the honesty of your stewards,
servants, and tradesmen, by not leading them
into temptation but deUvering them from
evil. A man who should be justly sensible
of the duties involved in expenditure and
determined to discharge them, would find the
burthen of them heavy ; and instead of having

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14 OF MONEY.

a pleasure in expense, he would probably
desire as much as might be to avoid the
trouble of it. We sometimes hear rich men
charged with parsimony because they look
minutely to diflFerences of cost ; but if they
are spending their money in a right spirit,
the question they have to consider is, not
whether the sum is of importance to them-
selves, but whether it is right or wrong that
it should be given and taken. If then the
acquisition of great wealth involve many
cares and troubles, not few are those which
should attend the due dispensing and
managing thereof, as well as the execution
of the various trusts belonging to the station
into which great wealth will lift a man : —

" For now know I in veray sothfastnesse
That in gret lordship, if I me wel avise,
Ther is gret servitude in sondry wise."*

Young men, instead of undertaking the
disagreeable oflBce of checking accounts, are
often inclined to lay out a good deal of

♦ Chancer. Gierke's Tale, Pars 5\

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OP MONEY. 15

money in the purchase of bows and smiles,
which they mistake for respect. It is only
the right and just payment that commands
real respect : and the obsequious extortioner
well understanding the weakness on which he
practises, will often repay himself for his own
servility, not only in money, but in secret
contempt for his dupe.

Prodigality is indeed the vice of a weak
nature, as avarice is of a strong one ; it
comes of a weak craving for those blandish-
ments of the world which are easily to be had
for money, and which, when obtained, are
as much worse than worthless as a harlot's
love is worse than none.

" Thrice happy he whose nobler thoughts despise
To make an object of so easy gains ;
Thrice happy he who scorns so poor a prize
Should be the crown of his heroic pains :
Thrice happy he who ne'er was bom to try
Her frowns or smiles ; or being bom, did lie
In his sad nurse's arms an hour or two, and die." *

Fourthly : — As to giving and taking. All

♦ Qnarles.

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16 OF MONEY,

giving is not generous; and the gift of a spend-
thrift is seldom given in generosity; for prodi-
gality is, equally with avarice, a selfish vice :
nor can there be a more spurious view of
generosity than that which has been often
taken by sentimental comedians and novelists^
when they have represented it in combination
with recklessness and waste. He who gives
only what he would as readily throw away,
gives without generosity ; for the essence of
generosity is in self-sacrifice. Waste, on the
contrary, comes always by self-indulgence;
and the weakness and softness in which it
begins will not prevent the hard-heartedness
to which all selfishness tends at last. The
mother of Gertruda

" In many a vigil of her last sick bed,
Bid her bevrare of spendthrifts as of men
That seeming in their youth not worse than light,
Would end not so, but with the season change ;
For Time, she said, which makes the serious soft.
Turns lightness into hardness."

When you give, therefore, take to yourself
no credit for generosity, unless you deny

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OF MONEY. 17

yourself something in order that you may
give.

I have known a man who was never rich,
and was indeed in a fair way to be ruined,
make a present of several hundred pounds,
under what he probably conceived to be an
impulse of generous friendship : but if that
man had been called upon to get up an hour
earlier in the morning to serve his friend, I
do not believe that he would have done it.
The fact was that he had no real value for
money, no real care for consequences which
were not to be immediate : in parting with
some hundreds of pounds he flattered his self-
love with a show of self-sacrifice ; in parting
with an hour's folding of the hands to sleep,
the self-sacrifice would have been real, and
the show of it not very magnificent.

Again, do not take too much credit even
for your self-denial, unless it be cheerfully
and genially undergone. Do not dispense
your bounties only because you know it
to be your duty, and are afraid to leave it
undone: for this is one of those duties

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18 OP MONEY.

which should be done more in the spirit of
love than in that of fear. I have known
persons who have lived frugally, and spent
a large income almost entirely in acts of
charity and bounty, and yet with all this
they had not the open hand. When the
act did not define itself as a charitable duty,
the spirit of the God-beloved giver was
wanting, and they failed in aU those little
genial liberalities towards friends, relatives,
and dependents, which tend to cultivate the
sympathies and kindnesses of our nature
quite as much as charity to the poor or
munificence in the contribution to public
objects.

The kindness from which a gift proceeds
will appear in the choice as well as in the
cost of it. I have known a couple who
married on 400/. a year, receive three car-
riages as wedding gifts, they being unable
of course to keep one. The donors had been
thinking rather of what would do credit
to themselves, than of what would be
serviceable and acceptable.

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OP MONEY. 19

When gifts proceed from public bodies,
communities, or high functionaries! in the
way of testimonials, and are to do honour
to the party receiving them, they should if
possible assume a shape in which they will
be seen without being shown.

There is often as much generosity in
accepting gifts as there can be in bestowing
them, — ^the generosity of a nature which
stands too strong in its humility to fear humi-
liation, which knows its own independence,
and is glad to be grateful.

Upon a very diflferent sense of generosity
are some of the practices of the present
time founded. It is not an uncommon thing
amongst some persons, with peculiar notions
of doing things delicately, for contributions
to be conveyed to some decayed gentle-
woman under various pretences which are
meant to disguise, more or less transparently,
the fact that she receives money in charity.
Some wretched products of her pencil, which
would not command one penny in the market,
are privately sold for five shillings a piece.

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20 OF MONEY.

and the proceeds are paid to her as if she
had earned them ; or a few deplorable
verses are stitched together and disposed
of in the same manner. It is surely
impossible to take a more unworthy view of
what should be the character and spirit
of a gentlewoman, than that which this
sort of proceeding implies. If a gentle-
woman be in want, she should say so with
openness, dignity, and truth, and accept in
the manner that becomes a gentlewoman,
in all lowliness but without the slightest
humiliation or shame, whatever money she
has occasion for and others are willing to
bestow. The relations between her and
them will in that case admit of respect
on the one side and gratitude on the
other. But where false and juggling pre-
tences are resorted to, no worthy or honest
feeling can have place. Delicacy is a strong
thing ; and whether in giving or taking,
let us always maintain the maxim, that
what is most sound and true is most
delicate.

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OP MONEY. 21

There are some other ways of the world
in this matter of charity, which proceed, I
think, upon false principles and feelings,
— charity dinners, charity balls, charity
bazaars, and so forth ; devices (not even once
blessed) for getting rid of distress without
calling out any compassionate feeling in
those who give or any grateful feeling in
those who receive. God sends misery and
misfortune into the world for a purpose;
they are to be a discipline for His creatures
who endure, and also for His creatures who
behold them. In those they are to give occa-
sion for patience, resignation, the spiritual
hopes and aspirations which spring from pain
when there comes no earthly relief, or the
love and gratitude which earthly ministra-
tions of relief are powerful to promote. In
these they are to give occasion for pity, self-
sacrifice, and devout and dutiful thought,
subduing — ^for the moment at least — ^the
light, vain, and pleasure-loving motions of
our nature. If distress be sent into the
world for these ends, it is not well that it

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22 OF MONEY.

should be shuflBed out of the world without
any of these ends being accomplished ; and
still less that it should be made the occasion
of furthering ends in some measure opposite
to these ; that it should be danced away at
a ball, or feasted away at a dinner, or
dissipated at a bazaar. Better were it in
my mind, that misery should run its course
with nothing but the mercy of God to stay
it, than that we should thus corrupt our
charities.

Let me not be misunderstood. Feasting
and dancing, in themselves and by them-
selves, I by no means disparage ; there is a
time and a place for them; but things
which are excellent at one time and occa-
sion, are a mere desecration at another. It
is much more easy to desecrate our duties
than to consecrate our amusements; and
better therefore not to mix them up with
each other.

Another modem mode is to raise a sub-
scription by shillings or pennies, — ^fixing the
contribution at so low a sum that nobody

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OP MONEY. 23

can care whether they give it or not, and
collecting it in the casual intercourse of
society. This is a less vitiated mode than the
others, being of a more negative character :
but if the others are corrupted charity, this
is no better than careless charity.

Lastly, there is a rule in giving which is
often overlooked by those whose generosity
is not sufficiently thoughtful and severe.
Generosity comes to be perverted from its
uses when it ministers to selfishness in others;
and it should be our care to give.all needful
support to our neighbour in his self-denial,
rather than to bait a trap for his self-indul-
gence; in short, to give him pleasure only
when it will do him good, not when sacrifices
on our part are the correlatives of abuses
on his ; for he who pampers the selfishness
of another, does that other a moral injury
which cannot be compensated by any amount
of gratification imparted to him.

" Give thou to no man, if thou wish him well,
What he may not in honour's interest take ;
Else shalt thou but befriend his faults, allied
Against his better with his baser self."

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24 OF MONEY.

Amongst the questionable acts which are
done from generous motives, is the not un-
common one of a son and heir in tail paying
the debts of a prodigal father deceased, out of
property which the father had no right to
appropriate. There may be instances in
which such an act would be worthy of all
praise; but perhaps the cases are not few
in which the eflfiect is purely pernicious,
enabling a spendthrift to squander another's
inheritance in addition to his own ; for the
frequency of the practice leads money-lenders
and others to calculate on the chances.

The motive of the son is the pious and
commendable one of shielding a parent's
memory from disgrace. But how far is this
end accomplished ? The selfishness which is
the ground of disgrace, is the same whether
it be the heir or the creditor that suffers by
it. The heir may suffer in silence, and the
sting of personal damage may make the
creditor cry out ; but in every just judgment
the shame and dishonour attaching to the
memory of the dead man should be measured

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OF MONEY. 25

by what he did when he was alive, and not
by the silence or outcry ensuing ; and it is
hardly a high view of moral assoilment, which
can regard with much complacency the mere
stifling of reproaches and hushing up of a
parent's memory. In many cases, therefore,
the weak and careless, or interested and
usurious creditor, should be left to bear his
loss when his debtor dies insolvent. Still
our philosophy is not to put Nature out of
office ; and if the prodigality of the parent
have been merely one of the infirmities of
'*a frail good man,'' and if the conduct of
the creditor have not been grossly culpable,
natural feeling should take its course, and
the blessing will be upon Shem and Japhet
rather than upon Ham.

Fifthly : — As to lending and borrowing.

Never lend money to a ftiend unless you
are satisfied that he does wisely and well in
borrowing it. Borrowing is one of the most
ordinary ways in which weak men sacrifice
the future to the present, and thence is it
that the gratitude for a loan is so proverbially

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26 OF MONEY.

evanescent : for the future, becoming present
in its turn, will not be well-pleased with
those who have assisted in doing it an injury.
By conspiring with your friend to defraud
his ftiture self, you naturally incur his future
displeasure. Take to heart, therefore, the
admonition of the ancient courtier : —

" Neither a borrower nor a lender be ;
For loan oft losetb both itself and friend.
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."*

To withstand solicitations for loans is often
a great trial of firmness ; the more especially
as the pleas and pretexts alleged are gene-
rally made plausible at the expense of truth ;
for nothing breaks down a man's truthfulness
more surely than pecuniary embarrassment —

" An unthrift was a liar from all time ;
Never was debtor that was not deceiver."

The refrisal which is at once the most safe
from vacillation, and perhaps as little apt to
give offence as any, is the point blank reftisal,
without reasons assigned. Acquiescence is

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OF MONEY. 27

more easily given in the decisions of a strong
will, than in reasons, which weak men, under
the bias of self-love, will always imagine
themselves competent to controvert.

Some men will lend money to a friend in
order, as it were, to purchase a right of re-
monstrance: but the right so purchased is
worth nothing. You may buy the man's ears,
but not his heart or his understanding.

I have never known a debtor or a prodigal
who was not, in his own estimation, an injured
man : and I have generally found that those
who had not suflfered by them were disposed to
side with them ; for it is the weak who make
the outcry, and it is by the outcry that the
world is wont to judge. They who lend money
to spendthrifts should be prepared, therefore,
to suffer in their reputation as well as in their
purse. Let us learn from the Son of Sirach : —
" Many, when a thing was lent them, reckoned
it to be found, and put them to trouble
that helped them. Till he hath received, he
will kiss a man's hand ; and for his neigh-
bour's money he will speak submissly ; but
c2

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28 OF MONEY.

when he should repay, he will prolong the
time, and return words of grief, and complain
of the time. If he prevail he shall hardly
receive the half^ and he will count as if he
had found it ; if not, he hath deprived him of
his money, and he hath gotten him an enemy
without cause : he payeth him with cursings
and railings, and for honour he will pay him
disgrace/'

It is a common reproach with which man-
kind assails mankind, that those who fall
into poverty are forsaken by their friends : —

" Ay, quoth Jacques,
Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens ;
'Tis just the fashion : wherefore do you look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ? " *

But before the friends of the poor be con-
demned, it would be well to inquire whether
their poverty have been honestly come by; and
I believe it would very rarely be found that a
person in a fair condition of life is allowed to
sink unassisted into extreme indigence with-

* "As You Like it," Act ii. Scene 1.

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OF MONEY. 29

out some serious fault and oflfence : and the
person having so sunk, it will be found to be
still more rarely the case that the pressure
of poverty is not too strong for his character.
It is when the character has given way, that
poverty is deserted: for pity and aflfection
divorced from respect, lose the main element
of their strength and permanency.

The ordinary course of things, then, is as
follows : — A becoming embarrassed, through
some (perhaps venial) imprudence, is kindly
assisted by his friends, B, C, and D; who,
however, do not altogether approve his con-
duct, but think it would be ungenerous in
them, under the protection of the favours they
are conferring, to assail him with reproaches.
So far all goes smoothly between A on the
one hand, and B, C, i), on the other. But
A, having, by the loans he has received, staved
off any immediate consequences of his im-
prudence, is under a rather stronger tempta-
tion than before to forego the severe self-
denial which would set him right again. He
has now broken the ice in the matter of

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30 OF MONEY.

asking favours; he has incurred whatever
humiliation belongs to it ; and having begged
once, it costs him comparatively little to beg
again. This process of begging and borrow-
ing goes on therefore, becoming continually
more frequent and less efficacious ; and as the
borrower grows less and less scrupulous, he
nourishes his pride (the ordinary refuge of
those who lose their independence) and
resents every repulse as an insult. B, C,
and D then discover that they are not to be
thanked for what they have lent, but rather
reproached for not lending more and more ;
whereupon they withdraw their friendship;
and those who ignorantly lod£ on, or perhaps
hear the story of -4, whilst B, C, and D are
silent out of consideration for him, make
r^narks on inconstancy in friendship and
the manner in which men are forsaken in
their adversity and distress.

The desertion by friends, however well
merited, leads the embarrassed man to con-
sider himself as a castaway, and throw him-
self into still more reckless and shameless

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OF MONEY. 31

courses ; and on the part of men in this condi-
tion there is sometimes seen a perfect infa-
tuation of extravagance, which seems to
proceed from the delusions of a disordered
mind and a sort of fascination in ruin. Such
men come to have a repugnance to spare
expense, because it brings the feeling of their
difficulties home to them ; and a relief in pro-
fuseness, because it seems for the moment to
renounce the very notion of embarrassment.
The end may be short of the gallows (for in
our days the gallows has fallen out of favour),
but it will scarcely be short of a punishment
worse than death : for men wiU not tolerate
in its necessary consequences that to which
they are very indulgent in its inchoation ; and
the " unfortunate debtor " who was cockered
with compassion whilst he was in that stage
of his existence, is regarded with just indig-
nation and abhorrence when he has passed
into that of the desperate outcast : though it
may be as much in the course of nature that
the one stage should follow the other, as that
a tadpole, if he lives, should grow to be a toad.

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32 OF MONEY.

Creditors have always been an obnoxious
people, and in divers times and countries the
laws which have awarded imprisonment for
insolvent debt have shared in their unpopu-
larity. But when we trace debt in its conse-
quences and look to all the social evils which
have their root in it, and when we consider
that in moral as well as in physical thera-
peutics, the principle of withstanding com-
mencements is all-important, we may well, I
think, bring ourselves to believe that insolvent
debt should be regarded as presumably crimi-
nal, and unless proved to be otherwise, should
fall withm the visitations of penal law.

There remains only to be considered,

Sixthly : — ^The subject of bequeathing : and
some topics which might have fallen under
this head have been anticipated in treating
of motives for saving.

To make a wiU in one way or another is of
course the duty of every person whose heir-
at-law is not the proper inheritor of all he
possesses: and unless where there is some
just cause for setting them aside, expectation^

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OP MONEY. 33

generated by the customs of the world are
sufficient to establish a moral right to inherit
and to impose a corresponding obligation to
bequeath. For custom may be presumed, in
the absence of any reasons to the contrary,
to have grown out of some natural fitness ;
and at all events it will have brought about
an amount of adaptation which is often
sufficient^ as regards individual cases, to make
a fitness where there was none. Unless in
exceptional instances, therefore, in which
special circumstances are of an over-ruling
force, the disappointment of expectations
growing out of custom is not to be inflicted
without some very strong and solid reasons
for believing that the custom needs to be
reformed. If there be such reasons, by all
means let the custom be disregarded, all ex-
pectations to the contrary notwithstanding —

" What custom wills, in all things should we do 't,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to overpeer."*

* " Coriolanus," Act ii. Scene 3.
c3

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34 OP MONEY.

But the pFesumption should be always held
to be in favour of custom, and he who de-
parts from it without the plea of special
circumstances, should be able to find in
himself a competency to correct the errors of
mankind.

If it be not well for the natural or cus-
tomary heirs that they should be disap-
pointed, neither is it good for those to whom
an inheritance is diverted, that wealth should
come upon them by surprise. Sudden and
unexpected accessions of wealth seldom pro-
mote the happiness of those to whom they
accrue ; and they are for the most part
morally injurious ; especially when they ac-
crue by undue deprivation of another.

But some part of the property of most
people, and a large part, or even the whole of
the property of some people, may not be the
subject of just or natural expectations on
the part of customary heirs ; and in respect of
such property there is a great liberty of judg-
ment on the part of the testator, though it is
to be a grave and responsible, not a capricious

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OF MONEY. 35

liberty. The testator has to consider to
whom the property will bring a real increase
of enjoyment without increase of temptation ;
and in whose hands it is likely most to pro-
mote the happiness of others. In general
the rule of judgment should be to avoid lift-
ing people out of one station into another ;
and to aim at making such moderate addi-
tions to moderate fortunes in careful hands
as may not disturb the proportion of property
to station,— or still better, may rectify any
disproportion, and enable those who are
living with a difficult frugality to live with
a free frugality.

Ttiis rule is not, I fear, very generally
regarded ; for mere rectitude, and the obser-
vance of measures and proportions, does not
much lay hold of the minds of men. On the
contrary, there is a general disposition to add
to anything which affects the imagination by
its magnitude; and there is also in some
people a sort of gloating over great wealth,
which infects them with a propensity to feed
a bloated fortune. Jacques took note of this

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36 OF MONEY.

when he saw the deer that was weeping in
" the needless stream " : —

" Thou Djak'st a testament
As worldings do, giving thy sum of more
To that which had too much."*

Thus it is that in the most solemn acts which
men have to perform in the management of
their money — ^in those too from which selfish
ends seem most removed — ^they will often
appear to be as little sensible of moral
motives and righteous responsibilities as in
any other transactions ; and even a testator
jamjam moriturus will dictate his will with
a sort of posthumous cupidity, and seem to
desire that his worldliness should live after
him.

* " Aa You Like it," Act u. Scene 1.

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OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

I PROPOSE to treat of these jointly, because
I regard them as inseparably connected in
life. We shall find, I think, on looking below
the surface, that Humility is the true mother
and nurse of Independence ; and that Pride,
which is so often supposed to stand to
her in that relation, is, in reality, the step-
mother, by whom is wrought — novercalibus
odiis — the very destruction and ruin of Inde-
pendence.

For pride has a perpetual reference to the
estimation in which we are holden by others;
fear of opinion is of the essence of it ; and
with this fear upon us it is impossible that
we should be independent. The proud man is
of all men the most vulnerable; and as there
is nothing that rankles and festers more than

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38 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

wounded pride, he has much cause for fear.
Pride, therefore — ^whether active or passive
— whether it goes forth to claim the defer-
ence of mankind, or secludes itself from the
danger of their disrespect — ^has always much
at stake, and leads a life of caution and soli-
citude. Humility, on the contrary, has no
personal objects, and leads its life in "the
service which is perfect freedom."

An uneasy, jealous, or rebellious feeling in
regard to ranks and degrees, argues this want
of independence through defect of humility.
It is the feeling of a man who makes too
much account of such things. A begrudging
of rank and station, and refusal of such
deference as the customs of the world have
conceded to them, will generally be found to
proceed from the man who secretly over-
values them^ and who, if himself in posses-
sion of them, would stretch his pretensions
too far. For plebeian pride and aristocratic
pride issue from one and the same source in
human nature. An illiberal self-love is at
the bottom of both.

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 39

When low-born men of genius, like Burns
the poet, maintain the superiority of intrinsic
worth to adventitious distinction, we can
readily go along with them so far: but when
they reject the claims of social rank and
condition in a spirit of defiance and resent-
ment, as if suffering a personal injury, we
may very well question whether they have
not missed of the independence at which
they aimed: for had their independence been
genuine, they would have felt that all they
possessed which was valuable was inalien-
able; and having nothing to lose by the social
superiority of the better bom, they would
have made them welcome to it as being
perhaps a not inequitable compensation for
the comparatively small share bestowed on
them of intellectual gifts and abilities.

If equality be what these men of in-
dependence would contend for, it can only
be had (if at all) by the balance of what is
adventitious: for natural equality there is
none. If personal merit be what they regard,
this, at least, will not found any claim for

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40 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

intellectual endowments to be preferred to
accidents of station. There is no more of
personal merit in a great intellect than in a
great estate. It is the use which is made of
the one and of the other, which should found
the claim to respect ; and the man who has it
at heart to make the best use he can of either,
will not be much occupied with them as a
means of commanding respect. Thus it is
that respect is commonly least due, as well
as least willingly accorded, where it is arro-
gated most, and that independence is hardly
possessed where it is much insisted on.
**The proud man," says St. Jerome, "(who
" is the poor man) braggeth outwardly, but
*' beggeth inwardly." The humble man, who
thinks little of his independence, is the man
who is strong in it; and he who is not solici-
tous of respect will commonly meet with as
much as he has occasion for. " Who calls?"
says the old shepherd in ''As You Like it;"
" Your betters," is the insolent answer: and
what is the shepherd's rejoinder? "Else
" are they very wretched." By what retort,

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 41

reprisal, or repartee, could it have been made
half so manifest that the insult had lighted
upon annour of proof Such is the invincible
independence of humility.

The declaration of our Saviour that the
meek shall inherit the earth, may be under-
stood, I think, as verified in the very nature
and attributes of meekness. The dross of
the earth the meek do not inherit; the
damnosa hcBreditas of the earth's pomps and
vanities descends to others : but all the true
enjoyments, the wisdom, love, peace, and
independence, which earth can bestow, are
assured to the meek as inherent in their
meekness. *"Tis in ourselves that we are
"thus or thus." It depends on our own
hearts to cast off the bondage of pride with
all its chains and sores, and by meekness to
possess the earth. For this possession comes
not by observation and saying "Lo ! here, or
Lo ! there : " * But as the Kingdom of Grod
is within us, so also is the inheritance of
the Earth :

* Luke xvii. 21.

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42 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

" How much that Genius boasts as her's

And fancies her's alone,
On you, Meek Spirits, Faith confers !

The proud have further gone,
Perhaps, through life's deep maze, but you
Alone possess the labyrinth's clue.

" To you the costliest spoils of thought.

Wisdom, unclaimed, yields up ;
To you the far-sought pearl is brought.

And melted in your cup ;
To you her nard and myrrh she brings.
Like orient gifts to infant kings.

" The single eye alone can see

All truths around us thrown.
In their eternal unity;

The humble ear alone
Has room to hold, and time to prize.
The sweetness of life's harmonies."*

If distinctions of rank, order, and degree
were of no other use in the world, they might
be desired for the exercise which they give
to a generous humility, on the part of those
who have them and of those who have them
not. The inequality of relation should culti-
vate this virtue on both sides ; those who have

* Aubrey De Vere ; Waldenses, and other Poems^ p. 165.

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 43

the superiority being disposed to prize it at
no more than its worth; those who have it
not, being glad to recognise superiority in
others, even in this its least substantial
form —

" Cloth of gold, be not too nice,
Though thou be match'd with cloth of frieze ;
Cloth of frieze be not too bold.
Though thou be match'd with cloth of gold."*

Here are two humilities enjoined; that which
in a superior forgets superiority — ^that which
in an inferior remembers inferiority: and
neither could have place without difference
of rank and degree.

When the social distinctions indicate power
and a governing authority, the relations be-
tween the parties are still more pregnant with
occasions for the exercise of humility. From
humility there will result, not only on the one
side a generous care and consideration in the
use of power, but likewise on the other, what
may be called a generous submission. For
though the world may be more aware of

* Old Saw.

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44 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

generosity shown in the exercise of power,
there is a generosity also in the spirit of obe-
dience, when it is cordial, willing, and free;
and this is the case only when the nature is
humble.

It is indeed chiefly in our intercourse with
equals and superiors that our humility is put
to the proof When the " Servus Servorum''
at Rome washes, according to annual usage,
the feet of some poor pilgrims, the ceremony,
if it be held to typify humility, should at the
same time be understood to be typical of the
easiest of all humilities. If the same person-
age were to hold the stirrup of an emperor,
the proceeding would be typical of another
degree of humility, — and one to which the
Potentates of the Earth could not bear witness
in his predecessors. Many people are gentle
and forbearing with those placed under them,
but proud and quarrelsome in their dealings
with those above them. Where humility is
wanting, there may be much submission
without generosity, or, on the other hand,
much resistance without an independent

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 45

spirit. The disposition to submit to autlio-
rity unduly, and where the interests of
others or our own are unjustly injured,
will never arise out of humility; it will
always arise out of those worldly anxieties
from which the humble heart is exempt.
The disposition to resist authority'' from per-
sonal feelings, where no duty dictates the
resistance, will never proceed from a genu-
ine spirit of independence; for the heart
is not independent which is engaged in a
struggle for personal objects. And whether
submitting or resisting, humility and inde-
pendence will still be found to go together ;
but they will for the most part be found to be
favoured by submission ; for the pride of the
human heart, which is commonly called up by
resistance even when not undue, is in like
manner abated by submission, even when
carried too far ; and wherever pride is abated,
the heart is raised and purified and made
free. Elevation, therefore, is chiefly to be
found in submission — " Govern them and lift
them up."

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46 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

Humility, like most other virtues, has its
credit a good deal shaken by the number of
counterfeits that are abroad. Amongst the
false humilities by which the world is most
flattered and beguiled, is that of the pro-
fessor in this kind who shrinks from all
censure and reprobation of what is evil,
under cover of the text, "Judge not lest
ye be judged ; " as if it were the intent of
that text, not to warn us against rash, pre-
sumptuous and uncharitable judgments, but
absolutely to forbid our taking account of the
distinction between right and wrong. ** It is
not for us to judge our brother," says the
humilitarian of this way of thinking ; '' we
know not how he may have been tempted ;
perhaps he was born with stronger passions
than other people ; it may have been that he
was ill brought up; peradventure he was
thrown amongst evil associates; we ourselves,
had we been placed in the same circum-
stances, might have been in like manner
led astray." Such are the false charities of
a false and popular humility. If we are

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 47

to excuse all the moral evU that we can
account for, and abstain from judging all
of which we can suppose that there is
some adequate explanation, where are we
to stop in our absolutions ? Whatever
villany exists in the world is compounded
of what is inborn and what comes by cir-
cumstance; there is nothing so base or
detestable but it is the consequence of some
adequate cause ; and if we are to make
allowances for all but causeless wickedness,
there is an end of condemnation.

The man of true humility, on the contrary,
will not spare the vices and errors of his
fellow-creatures, any more than he would his
own ; he will exercise manftdly and without
fear or favour, those judicial functions which
God has committed in some greater or less
degree to every member of the human com-
munity ; but he will come to the task, on
serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but
praying to have "a right judgment in all
things ;" and whilst exercising that judgment
in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will

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48 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

feel that to judge his brother is a duty and
not a privilege ; and he will judge him in
sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of
that fallen nature of which he is himself
part and parcel.

There is a current and a natural opinion,
that a man has no right to censure in others
a fault with which he is himself chargeable.
But even this limitation is founded, I think,
upon the same erroneous notion, of moral
censure being an honourable privilege instead
of a responsible function, a franchise instead
of a due. No faults are better known and
understood by us than those whereof we
have ourselves been guilty; none, surely,
should be so personally obnoxious to us as
those by which we have ourselves been de-
filed and degraded : and may we not, there-
fore, be expected to be quick in perceiving
them, and to regard them with a peculiar
bitterness, rather than to overlook them in
others? I would answer, assuredly yes : but
always with this proviso — that to bitterness
of censure should be added confession and

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 49

humiliation and the bitterness of personal
shame and contrition. Without this the
censure is not warrantable, because it is not
founded upon a genuine moral sense ; it is
not, indeed, sincere: for though the oflFence
may be worthy of all disgust and abhor-
rence, that abhorrence and disgust cannot
be reaUy felt by those who have committed
the like oflFence themselves without shame
or repentance.

Besides the false humility under cover of
which we desert the duty of censuring our
fellow-creatures, there are others by which
we evade or pervert that of censuring our-
selves. The most common of the spurious
humihties of this kind, is that by which a
general language of self-disparagement is sub-
stituted for a distinct discernment and specific
acknowledgment of our real faults. The
humble individual of this class will declare
himself to be very incontestably a miserable
sinner; but at the same time there is no
particular fault or error that can be imputed
to him from which he will not find himself

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50 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

to be happUy exempt. Each item is seve-
rally denied; and the acknowledgment of
general sinfulness turns out to have been an
unmeaning abstraction — a sum total of
cyphers. It is not thus that the Devil makes
up his accounts.

Another way is to confess faults from
which we are tolerably free, being perhaps
chargeable with no larger a share of them
than is common to humanity, whilst we pass
over the sins which are more pecuharly and
abundantly our own. Real humiUty will
not teach us any undue severity, but truth-
fulness in self-judgment. " My Son, glorify
thy soul in meekness, and give it honour
according to the dignity thereof."* For undue
self-abasement and self-distrust will impau*
the strength and independence of the mind,
which, if accustomed to have a just satisfac-
tion with itself where it may, will the better
bear to probe itself, and will lay itself open
with the more fortitude to intimations of its

*^ Ecclesiasticus, x. 28.

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 51

weakness on points in which it stands truly
in need of correction. No humility is
thoroughly sound which is not thoroughly
truthful. The man who brings misdirected
or inflated accusations against himself, does
so in a false humility, and will probably be
found to indemnify himself on one side or
another. Either he takes a pride in his
supposed humility; or escaping in his self-
condemnations from the darker into the
hghter shades of his life and nature, he plays
at hide and seek with his conscience.

And true humiUty, being a wise virtue, will
deal more in self-examination and secret
contrition than in confession. For confession
is often a mere luxury of the conscience, —
used as the epicures of ancient Rome would
use an emetic and a warm bath before they
sat down to a feast. It is often also a very
snare to the maker of it, and a delusion
practised on the party to whom it is made.
For, first, the faults may be such as words
will not adequately explain: secondly, the
plea of ** guilty " shakes judgment in her seat :
d2

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52 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

thirdly, the indulgence shown to confession
might be better bestowed on the shame
which conceals ; for this tends to correction,
whereas confession will many times stand
mstead of penitence to the wrong-doer ; and
sometimes even a sorrowful penitence stands
in the place of amendment, and is washed
away in its own tears.

There is a frivolous practice of confession,
much used in certain classes of society, by
which young ladies or others, in the earlier
moments, of a friendship, take out a hcense
to talk of themselves. In the confessionals
of the ball-room, much superfluity of naughti-
ness is mutually disclosed, by persons who
might have been better employed in dancing
than in confessing. This needs not to be
very severely noticed ; yet it points to an
infirmity against which it may be well to be
on our guard ; and when the occasion is sujBBl-
ciently serious, we should take care that our
confessions are free from any egotistical taint.

Of all false humilities the most false is to
be found in that meeting of extremes wherein

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HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 53

humility is corrupted into pride. John
Wesley, when he was desirous to fortify his
followers against ridicule, taught them to
court it. " God forbid," said he, *' that we
should not be the laughing-stock of man-
kind!" But it is through pride, and not
in humility, that any man will desire to be a
laughing-stock. And though it may seem at
first sight that he has attained to an inde-
pendence of mankind when he can brave
their laughter, yet this is a fallacious appear-
ance : it will be found that in so far as his
humility was corrupted, his independence
was undermined; and whilst courting the
ridicule of the world, he is in reality courting
the admiration and applause of his party or
sect, or fearing their rebuke. This is the
dependence into which he has fallen, and
there is probably no slavery of the heart
which is comparable to that of sectarian
pride. Moreover Mr. Wesley's followers doubt-
less deemed that the laughers were in danger
of hell-fire. Where then was their charity
when they desired to be laughed at by all

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54 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE.

mankind ? Or if (without desiring it) they
deemed mankind, themselves only excepted,
to be in so reprobate a state, that the
religious must needs be a laughing-stock, —
was this their humility ? I wish to speak of
Mr. Wesley with respect, not to say reverence:
but in this instance I think that his appeal
was made to a temper of mind in his fol-
lowers which was not purely Christian. It
is not the meek who will throw out this sort
of challenge and defiance: and it is pride
and not humility which we shall find to lie
at the bottom of any such ostentatious self-
abasement —

" For Pride,
Which is the Devil's toasting-fork, doth toast
Him brownest that his whiteness vaunteth most.'*

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

"What do you think of marriage?" says
the Duchess of Malfy in Webster's play, and
Antonio answers —

" I take it as those that deny purgatory ;
It locally contams or heaven or hell ;
There is no third place in it."

When I was young and inexperienced in
wives, I did not take the same view of mar-
riage which Antonio took. I used to say
that there were two kinds of marriages, with
either of which a man might be content ; the
one "the incorporate existence marriage," the
other "the pleasant additament marriage."
For I thought that if a man could not com-
mand a marriage by which all interests would
be deepened, all objects exalted, rewards
and forfeitures doubled and far more than

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56 OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE.

doubled, and all the comparatives of life
turned into superlatives, then there remained
nevertheless a very agreeable kind of re-
source, — a marriage, that is, in which one
might Uve one's own substantive life with the
additional embellishment of some gracefiil,
simple, gay, easy-hearted creature, who would
lie light upon the surface of one's being, be at
hand whenever solitude and serious pursuits
had become irksome, and never be in the way
when she was not wanted. Visions these are ;
merely dreams of our Epicurean youth. There
is no such wife, and marriage is what Antonio
took it to be.

And marriage being thus the highest stake
on this side the grave, it seems strange that
men should be so hasty in the choice of a wife
as they sometimes are; for if we look about us
at those marriages in which men and women
have chosen for themselves, we shall find
that even where there has been no absolute
passion to expedite the business, the choice
has not always been preceded by much deli-
beration. Perhaps it is owing to that very

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 57

fact of the decision being so critical, that it is
often a little hurried ; for when great interests
are depending, we deliberate with an anxiety
to avoid error which presently becomes too
painful to be endured, and perhaps, also, too
disturbing to be successful ; and it is at some
crises of their fortunes that men in all times
have been disposed to commit them to Provi-
dence, under various forms of reliance, some
religious, others superstitious. We are most
sensible of the fallibility of human judg-
ment in those matters in which it is most
essential to judge well, and to the irreligious
man, fate, destiny, chance, sortilege, the stars
— anything seems more trustworthy ; whilst
he who is not irreligious knows that what is
done in faith will be justified in the fruits, be
they sweet or bitter. The maid who '*was
married one morning as she went into the
garden for parsley to stuflF a rabbit," might
have nothing to fear in marriage if she was
one to whom all things work together for good.
Men who know not in what to put trust will
often fall into the fatal error of supposing that
d3

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58 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

some of the graver consequences of marriage
are to be escaped by concubinage, — a sup-
position from which, if there be no better
monitor at hand, even the wisdom of this
world might withhold them. Unless they
be utterly heartless and worthless, they will
find that the looser tie is not the lighter.
Mistresses, if they have any hold on the
aflFections, are generally more exacting than
wives ; and with reason, for there will natu-
rally be the most assertion of claims where
there is the least ground for confidence. The
claims strengthen with time, whilst the
qualities for which mistresses are commonly
chosen, and on which they depend for their
charm, are proverbially perishable. Beauty
and the vivacities of youth fall away as soon
from the concubine as if she were a wife ;
domestic cares and jealousies will accrue as
readily in the one case as in the other ; and
unless generosity be out of the question, and
a man have so " corrupted his compassions "
as to have deliberately determined to keep a
woman's affections until they should involve

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 59

the caxes naturally belonging to the affections
and then to cast them off, there is no one of
the burthens, vexations, dues and responsi-
bilities incident to marriage, which will not
be felt with ten-fold force in concubinage.
Such are the miscalculations of selfishness.
A man thinks that he has hung a trinket
round his neck, and behold ! it is a millstone.
Whilst one man will be hurried into a
marriage from the very painfulness of per-
plexity, another will live and die a bachelor
out of mere indecision. The latter case is the
more rare, and requires a peculiar serenity of
temper and strength of irresolution. But it
can occur. And the cases occur very fre-
quently in which a man misses, through
indecision, the opportunity of making the
marriage he would have liked best, and then,
resolving to be indecisive no more, takes a
wrong decision. So that having regard to
the various sources from which error pro-
ceeds in such matters, it may perhaps be
reasonably doubted whether a passion, with
all its impetuosities and illusions, affords.

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60 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

comparatively speaking, an ill-guidance ; and
whether those who have surrendered to it
might not have been as much misled had
they proposed to themselves the task of
making a calm and judicious choice.

And indeed the seasonable time for the
exercise of prudence is not so much in
choosing a wife or a husband, as in choosing
with whom you will so associate as to risk
the engendering of a passion. Even in this
choice the prudence should not be cold-
blooded; for a cold-blooded choice of associates
is likely to lead to a cold-blooded marriage.
With the leanings and leaps of the heart in
the new acquaintanceships of the young, there
should be just so much prudence presiding
as will turn them away from what there is
reasonable ground for believing to be false,
selfish, weak or vicious. There should be
thus much and no more. If the taste and
fancy are resisted upon grounds less sub-
stantial than these, they are resisted by what
is less worthy to prevail than they ; for the
taste and fancy are by no means of small

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 61

account — ^they are indeed of all but para-
mount importance — in human life and inter-
course. The taste lies, deep in our nature,
and strikes the key-note with which outward
circumstance is to harmonise.

But if the taste be in truth a matter of
such import and ascendancy in our life, it
follows that we are deeply responsible for
the formation of it. It is, like everything
else in us, partly of Nature's fashioning,
partly of our own; and though it is to rest
upon the foundation of our natural dispo-
sitions, it is to be built, not like a baby-house
at our pleasure, but according to the laws
and model of the great Architect, like a temple.
If there can be little that is genial or cordial
in our life, married or unmarried, unless the
taste be indulged, for that very reason it
behoves us so to raise and purify the taste
as to be enabled to give way to it in safety
and innocence — ^not certainly with a total
abandonment or an absolute affiance —
nothing short of perfection in taste could
justify that — but with a trust proportioned

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to the degree of purity and elevation which
has been attained. According to this mea-
sure our habitual propensities will be towards
what is good ; whilst the habit of guarding
and correcting the taste will prevail to some
extent even over its more impassioned move-
ments ; and if we are carried away by our
fancy, we shall yet know whither we are
going, and give some guidance as well as
take some.

Wealth and worldly considerations have a
good deal to do with the choice made in most
marriages; and though the taste which is
under these influences will not be supposed
to be very high, yet if it cannot be elevated,
better that a man should take the lower
course to which it points, than aim at what
is above him. If his mind be habitually in-
volved in worldly interests and pursuits, he
has no right to suppose that by stepping
aside from them on a single occasion, even
though it be the most important of all occa-
sions, he can place himself in a different order
of beings, or bring himself into harmony with

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 63

what is high and free. What he has to do
is to emancipate his mind if he can ; but if
not, to marry according to the conditions of
his slavery. For if he marries from a mere
impulse of his higher mind, whilst he is still
in habitual subjection to the lower, the
impulse will pass away, whilst the habit
stands fast, and the man will find that he
has introduced a discord into his life, or
rather that he has composed it in the wrong
key. The man who marries for money has
one advantage over those who marry for
other considerations ; he can know what he
gets ; if he can feed upon husks and draflT,
it is competent to him to see that his trough
is fiUed.

But if marrying for money is to be jus-
tified only in the case of those unhappy
persons who are fit for nothing better, it does
not follow that marrying without money is
to be justified in others, — ^marrying, that is,
without the possession or the fair prospect
of a competency suited to their condition
in life. What is to constitute such a

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64 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

competency depends in a great measure on
the prudence, independence, and strength
in self-denial of the parties. Those who
resolve to marry on very small means,
against the wishes of their relatives and
friends, should always consider that they
are setting up a claim to an extraordinary
shai*e of these excellent virtues ; and they
should not expect their claim to be readily
acknowledged unless it be founded, not
merely on good intentions, but on actual
savings, on ascertained facts of frugality and
habits of self-sacrifice. Without such habits,
they may intend and profess what they
please as to independence and self-reliance:
the result will be that they have indulged
their unworldly inclinations at the expense
of others.

Rank and station have an influence which,
though not very high or worthy, is to be
regarded, I think, as somewhat less bare and
poor than motives which are merely mer-
cenary. There is something in differences
of rank and degree which affects the imagi-

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OF CHOICE IN MABRIAGE. 66

nation, as everything does which is unfa-
miliar ; and an imaginative person is perhaps
more apt to fall in love with what is either
above him or below him in station, than with
what is on a dead level with him. This,
however natural, should be looked upon as a
misdirection of the fancy ; for any extreme
inequaUty of station will commonly lead to
sore trials in marriage.

Beauty, in itself and of itself, has, I believe,
less power in determining matrimonial choice
than at first sight it might seem natural that
it should have. The charm of mere physical
and corporeal beauty is perhaps too open
and immediate to involve consequences ; its
first effect is too strong in proportion to its
further effects : for the imagination of man
wishes to feel that it has something to come
to; and there is a charm more insidiously
winning in that which turns to beauty as you
advance, than in that which declares itself
as beauty fi-om the first.

Lord Bacon has said that '^ there is no
excellent beauty without some strangeness in

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66 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

the proportion ; " from which I infer that the
beauty which had individuality was alone
excellent in his eyes ; and I believe this to be
so fan prevalent amongst mankind, that whilst
the name of beauty is given to perfection of
symmetry, the power of beauty is felt in a
slight deviation from it— just sufficient to
individualise without impairing. It is this
peculiarity, this "some strangeness," which
lays hold of the imagination.

But even when such a hold has been taken,
the first feelings are those of admiration
rather than love, and there must be some-
thing in the beauty indicating something
besides the beauty, in order that the admira-
tion may pass into love. If other forces are
behind, admiration is an excellent herald and
harbinger of love ; if not, admiration will not
of itself constitute love; indeed, where the
passion of love has attained to its fiill force,
admiration will sometimes be almost lost and
absorbed : " She loved too deeply to admire,"
said one lady writing of another some thirty
years ago.

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OP CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 67

It is commonly said that beauty, howsoever
enchanting before marriage, becomes a matter
of indifference after. But if the beauty be
of that quaUty which not only attracts
admiration, but helps to deepen it into love,
I am not one of those who think that what
charmed the lover is forthwith to be lost
upon the husband. It is doubtless a ques-
tion of kind. There may be much beauty,
eminent in its way, which is but " the per-
fume and suppliance of a minute ; " but there
exists also a species and quaUty of beauty,
the effect whereof (as I conceive) it would
not be possible for daily familiarity to
deaden, and the power whereof may be
expected to last as long as the beauty itself
lasts, and perhaps much longer. Pictures
and statues wrought by the more spiritual
masters of art, do not satiate the sense ; and
if in that beauty which is of art's creation,
when the art is of the highest order, there is
this cleaving and abiding power, we are not
to doubt that Nature, which creates the art, is
competent to create without the intervention

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of the art, a beauty expressed in flesh and
blood, that may be constantly lived with
and daily dwelt upon, yet be found to be nat
less inexhaustible in its charm. Other objects
will intervene, no doubt, where beauty is pre-
sent to our daily life ; a man cannot be con-
sciously and continually occupied with such
impressions; insuscieptible moods will inter-
vene also, and the perceptions will from time
to time be overclouded ; this will be the case
in regard to works of art, and even in regard
to those natural and universal sources from
which the sense of beauty in man is nou-
rished as with its daily food ; nor can it be
otherwise in regard to human beauty : but
when this beauty is pure and spiritual, I see
no reason to suppose that it will be a less per-
manent source than those, others ; and I will
not consent to believe that daily familiarity
with it will make it of no eflfect, any more
than that the flowers will cease to please
because they hang over our doors, or the
stars because they shine nightly.
The exception to be taken to beauty as a

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OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE. 69

marriage portion, (if it be beauty of the
highest order,) is not therefore that it can
become otherwise than precious whilst it
lasts, but rather that, as it is precious so is
it perishable, and that, let it be valued as it
may, it must be accounted at the best but a
melancholy possession : —

" For human beauty is a sight
To sadden rather than delight ;
Being the prelude of a lay
Whose burthen is decay."

And if it be our fortune to encounter in flesh
and blood a beauty which seems to revive
for us the realities from which Bafaello and
Perugino painted, we are to consider whether
to possess such beauty in marriage and see
it subjected to the changes and chances of
this mortal life, would not bring upon us the
same sort of feeling with which we should
contemplate a Madonna or a St. CeciUa hang-
ing exposed to the weather and losing some
tenth part of its form and colouring with
each successive winter.
I have said that, considering the many

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misguidances to which a deliberative judgment
is exposed in the matter of marriage, there
may often be less risk of error in a choice
which is impassioned. But I ought perhaps
to have explained that by a passion I do not
mean — ^what young ladies sometimes mistake
for it — a mere imaginative sentiment, dream,
or illusion. Such imaginative sentiments,
dreams, or illusions, not only do not consti-
tute a passion, but they commonly render the
person who indulges them incapable of con-
ceiving one ; they bring out a strong fancy
perhaps, but a weak and wasted heart. This
is well understood by worldly mothers, who
will rather promote than discourage a rapid
succession of such sentiments, resting upon
the maxim that there is safety in numbers.
In destitution there is security from arrest,
in nakedness there is security from a rending
of garments, and in this beggary of the heart
there is security from a passion.

But if the heart have been trained in the
way that it should go, the passion to which
it will lie open will be something very different

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 71

from a warm illusion or a sentimental dream,
though very possibly including these, and
having begun in them. For true love is not,
I think, that isolated and indivisible unity
which it might be supposed to be from the
way in which it is sometimes spoken of. It
is mixed and manifold acgording to the abun-
dance of the being, and in a large nature
becomes in its progress a highly composite
passion; commonly, no doubt, having its
source in admiration and imaginative senti-
ment, but as it rolls on, involving divers tribu-
taries, swollen by accessory passions, feelings,
and affections, — ^pity, gratitude, generosity,
loyalty, fideUty, anxiety, fear, and devotion,
— and deepened by the embankments of duty
and justice — ^foreign to the subject as these
last may seem to some. In short, the whole
nature and conscience being worked upon by
this passion, re-act upon it and become inter-
fused and blended with it ; not by an absorp-
tion of all elements into one, but by a develop-
ment of each into each : and when, therefore,
I aflBlrm that passion, err though it may, will

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72 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

be often less misleading than the dispassionate
judgment, I do but aver that the entire nature
— treason, conscience, and aflFections, inter-
penetrating and triune, — ^that this totality of
the nature, raised, vivified, and enlarged by
love — is less likely to take an erroneous
direction than a part of the nature standing
aloof and dictating to the other parts.

I say not, however, that the risk is small
in either case or under any guidance. Far
from it. And the preference to be given to
passion as a guide, will depend upon the
natural capabiUties, and the maturity and
cultivation of the moral, spiritual, and intel-
lectual mind. If there be much of this for
the passion to call out, it will be an exalted
and enlightened passion, and may see its way.
If there be little, it will be a blind passion.
Whence it follows that passion is not to be
taken for a guide in extreme youth ; in the
rawness of the moral and spiritual elements,
and the greenness of the judgment. And as
it is in these days that a first passion will
most fi-equently take place, it will generally

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OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE. 73

be found, I believe, that a second may be
better trusted.

If, however, I mamtain that passion in one
season or another of our soul's progress, is to
have a voice of much force and potency in the
direction of the judgment, and will enlighten
it on some points more than it may bedarken
it on others, this is not because I unagine
that it can realise its illusions or establish its
empire in marriage. Passion is of course
designed by Nature to be transitory, — a
paroxysm, — ^not a state. And then the ques-
tion arises which has been so often agitated,
whether the affection which succeeds marriage
is in all cases much influenced — and if influ-
enced, how influenced — ^by the nature of the
feeling which preceded ? Whether a passion
which has transmigrated into an affection
carries with it into the affection any elements
which could not exist in an affection other-
wise originating? When it begins with pas-
sion, there must needs be a period of collapse
and regurgitation, or at least of subsidence.
Whether, therefore, is the affection the

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weaker for never having known the high
tide, or the stronger for not having felt the
refluence? This temporary flooding of the
affections, does it devastate as regards
durable results, or does it enrich?

I think that the predominance, amounting
almost to universaUty, of the law of Nature
which places us once in our Uves at least
under the dominion of this passion, would
afford of itself a strong presumption that
some beneficial result is to be brought about
by it. And if it be admitted (as without any
offence to Calvin I hope it well may), that
the better part of most human beings is the
larger part, it will follow that this temporary
expansion and outburst of the whole of the
being, wiU bring a greater accession of good
activities than of bad ; and as the first cry of
the infant is necessary to bring the lungs into
play, so the first love of the adult may,
through a transitory disturbance, be designed
to impart a healthy action to the moral and
spiritual nature. The better the tree, the
better of course will be the fi*uits ; neither

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OF CHOICE IN MABRIAGE. 75

the rains of spring nor the glow of summer
will make grapes grow upon brambles ; but
whatever the finiits may be, the yield will be
larger after every seasonable operation of
Nature has been undergone. With the few
in whom envy, jealousy, suspicion, pride, and
self-love are predominant, there may be an
aggravation of these evil dispositions or of
some of them; but to them (and God be
praised they are the many) with whom humi-
lity, generosity, the love of God, and the love
of God's creatures, though partly latent per-
haps, is powerftdly inherent, the passion of
love will bring with it an enlargement and a
deepening and strengthening of these better
elements, such as no other visitation of
merely natural influences, however favour-
ably received and dutifully cherished, could
avail to produce. And when the passion has
passed away, the enlargement of the nature
will remain; and as the better and more
abounding human being will make the
better and more abounding husband or
wife, so will the marriage which has been

E 2

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76 OP CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

preceded by a passion, be abettermarriage —
other things alike — ^than that which has not
— ^more exalted, more genial, more affluent
in affections.

If the passion have ended, not in a marriage
but in a disappointment, the nature, if it have
strength to bear the pressure, will be more
ennobled and purified by that than by success.
Of the uses of adversity which are sweet,
none are sweeter than those which grow out
of disappointed love ; nor is there any greater
mistake in contemplating the issues of life,
than to suppose that baffled endeavours and
disappointed hopes bear no finiits, because
they do not bear those particular fruits which
were sought and sighed for : —

" The tree
Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched
By its own fallen leaves ; and man is made,
In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes
And things that seem to perish."

Indeed the power and spiritual efficacy of
love can hardly be realised to its ftdl extent
without either disappointment, or at least

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reverses, vicissitudes, and doubts ; and of the
fact which Shakspeare observes, that

" The course of trae love never did run smooth,"

perhaps this explanation maybe given, — ^that
roughnesses are needful in order to make the
love true; and marriages that follow upon
trouble, trial, and vicissitude, will be more
likely to be conservative of the love by which
they have been achieved, than those which
are merely the crown or coronal of a triumphal
career in courtship :

*' The flowers in sunshine gathered soonest fade."

Amongst the obstructions which the course
of love has commonly to encounter, one which
is specified by Shakspeare is the opposition of
parents ; and it is often one of the most per-
plexing problems in human life to determine
to what length parental opposition should
proceed in such cases. A moderate opposi-
tion can seldom do harm, unless there be
positive perversity in the parties opposed, so
that opposition shall be in itself a provocative
to folly. Such perversity apart, a moderate

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78 OP CHOICE IN MABRIAGE-

opposition will suffice to set aside a weak
love, whilst it will tend to consolidate a strong
one ; and it will thus act favourably in either
case, so far as regards that most essential
element in all such matters, — ^the weakness
or strength of the aflFection. In respect of an
opposition beyond this, it seems hardly pos-
sible to generalise, the qualities of the persons
and the specialties of the cases being so all-
important. In extreme youth, obedience
should be the rule of the child. But so soon
as the child shall have attained to a fair
maturity of judgment^ there is a moral respon-
sibility for the just exercise of that judgment
which must not be overlaid by an exagge-
rated notion of filial duty. Of the members
of a family it is for the benefit of all that
each should act upon each with some degree,
though with very different degrees, of con-
trolling influence. The sons and daughters,
when children no longer, are to demean them-
selves towards the parents with humility,
deference, and a desire to conform, but not
with an absolute subjection of the judgment

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OP CHOICE IN MARBIAGE. 79

and the will. On the question of choice in
marriage, as on other questions on which
both child and parent are personally con-
cemed, if the child presumptuously conceive
that his judgment is mature when it is not
mature, or that it is worthy to be weighed
with his parents' when it is not worthy, he is
culpable of course, being chargeable, not with
mere error of judgment, but with the sin of
presumption. On the other hand, if in all
humility of heart and desire to be dutiful, he
shall nevertheless clearly perceive, or think
he perceives, that his judgment is the juster
and is guided by higher, purer, and more
righteous views of life, it behoves him, after
much patience and the neglect of no endea-
vour to bring about a coincidence of judg-
ment, to resist his parents' judgment and
give eflFect to that which he conceives to be
better ; and this for his parents' sake as well
as for his own. We all need resistance to
our errors on every side. " Woe unto us when
all men shall speak well of us !'' and woe unto
us also, when all men shall give way to us !

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80 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.

It may be a sacred duty on the part of a
child to give a helpfiil resistance to a parent,
when the parent is the more erring of the
two ; and the want of such resistance, espe-
cially on the part of daughters, (for they are
more prone than sons to misconceive their
duties of this kind, or to fail in firmness), has
often betrayed a parent into fatal errors, fol-
lowed by life-long remorse. Women, in a
state of exaltation firom excited feelings,
imagining because duty often requires self-
sacrifice, that when they are sacrificing them-
selves they must needs be doing their duty,
will often be capable of taking a resolution,
when they are not capable of undergoing the
consequences with fortitude. For it is one
sort of strength that is required for an act of
heroism; another, and a much rarer sort.
Which is available for a life of endurance.
Probably most people could quote instances
within their own knowledge, in which the
daughter has obeyed, and then losing her
health, and with it perhaps her temper and
her resignation, has died of what is called a

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OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE. 81

broken heart ; thus» as it were, heaping coals
of fire upon the parents' head.

But if an unreasonable opposition to a
daughter's choice be not to prevail, I thmk
that, on the other hand, the parents, if their
views of marriage be pure from worldliness,
are justified in using a good deal of manage-
ment — ^not more than they very often do use,
but more than they are wont to avow or than
society is wont to countenance, — with a view
to putting their daughters in the way of such
marriages as they can approve. It is the
way of the world to give such management
an ill name, — ^probably because it is most used
by those who. abuse it to worldly purposes;
and I have heard a mother pique herself on
never having taken a single step to get
her daughters married, — ^which appeared to
me to have been a dereliction of one of the
most essential duties of a parent. If the
mother be wholly passive, either the daugh-
ters must take steps and use management
for themselves (which is not desirable), or the
happiness and the most important interests
e3

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82 OF CHOICE IN MABRIAGE.

of their lives, moral and spiritual, must be
the sport of chance and taike a course purely
fortuitous; and in many situations, where
unsought opportunities of choice do not
abound, the result may be not improbably
such a love and marriage as the mother and
every one else contemplates with astonish-
ment. Some such astonishment I recollect
to have expressed on an occasion of the kind
to an illustrious poet and philosopher, whose
reply I have always borne in mind when
other such cases have come under my obser-
vation: — **We have no reason to be surprised,
unless we knew what may have been the
young lady's opportunities. If Miranda had
not fallen in with Ferdinand, she would have
been in love with Caliban.'*

But management, if it is to be recom-
mended, must be good management, and not
the management by which young ladies are
hurried from ball-room to ball-room, so that a
hundred prelibations may give one chance to
be swallowed. A very few ball-rooms will
afford the means of introduction and selec-

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OF CHOICE IN MABRIAGE. 83

tion of acquaintaiiees ; and the intercourse
which, by imparting a real knowledge of the
dispositions, will give the best fkcilities of
choice, will be that which is withdrawn, by
one remove and another, from gay metro-
politan assemblies — ^first, to intercourse in
country places; secondly, to domestic society.
Our present manners admit, perhaps, too
much freedom of intercourse in public, too
little in private. The light familiarity of
festive meetings is carried far enough, further
than tends to attach; but the graver intimacy
is wanting. Milton complained that in his
time choice in marriage was difficult, because
there was not "that freedom of access,
granted or presumed, as may suffice to a
perfect discerning till too late."* In our age
the freedom of access is sufficient; but the
access is, for the most part, at times and
places where nothing can be discerned but
the features of a restless and whirling life.
And if Milton could say, ** Who knows not
that the bashful muteness of a virgin may

* Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ch. 3.

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84 OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE.

ofttimes hide all the unliveliness and natural
sloth which is really unfit for conversation/'
we, on the other hand, who cannot reasonably
complain of the bashful muteness of the
virgins, may be in our own way perplexed in
the attempt to discover what is the life that
lies beneath those dancing and glancing out-
sides of which we see so much. But the
difficulty of managing well in this respect
depends less on our manners in regard to the
intercourse between girls and men, than on
the general mode of living, which, in some sec-
tions of society (not in all), tends to separate
domestic from social life, and to subjugate
the former to the latter.

It may be observed, I think, that women
of high intellectual endowments and much
dignity of deportment, have the greatest
difficulty in marrying, and stand most in
need of a mother's help. And this, not be-
cause they are themselves fastidious (for they
are often as little so as any), but because
men are not humble enough to wish to have
their superiors for their wives.

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OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 85

Great wealth in .a woman tends to keep at
a distance both the proud and the humble,
leaving the unhappy live-bait to be snapped
at by the hardy and the greedy. If the
wealthy father of an only daughter could be
gifted with a knowledge of what parental
care and kindness really is, it is my assured
belief that he would disinherit her. If he
leaves her his wealth, the best thing for her
to do is to marry the most respectable indi-
vidual she can find of the class of men who
marry for money. An heiress remaining
unmarried is a prey to all manner of extor-
tion and imposition, and with the best inten-
tions becomes, throughill-administered expen-
diture and misdirected bounty, a corruption
to her neighbourhood and a curse to the poor;
or if experience shall put her on her guard,
she will lead a life of resistance and suspicion,
to the injury of her own mind and nature.

In the case, therefore, of either high en-
dowments or great wealth in a daughter, the
care of a parent is peculiarly needed to
multiply her opportunities of making a good

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86 OF CHOICE IN MARBIAGE.

choice in marriage ; and in no case can snch
care be properly pretermitted.

When the mother taikes no pains, the mar-
riage of the daughter, even if not in itself
ineligible, is likely to be unduly deferred.
For the age at which marriages are to be
contracted is a very material consideration,
Aristotle was of opinion that the bridegroom
should be thirty-seven years of age and the
bride eighteen; allegmg physical reasons
which I venture to think exceedingly incon-
clusive. Eighteen for the bride is the least to
be objected to, and would yet be rather early
in this climate. A girl of that age may be
not absolutely unprepared for marriage ; but
she has hardly had time for that longing and
yearning affection which is to be her best
security after. Sir Thomas More, in account-
ing for Jane Shore's infidelity to her hus-
band, observes, that "forasmuche as they
wer coupled ere she wer wel ripe, she not
very fervently loved for whom she never
longed." But whether or not the girl be to
be considered ripe at eighteen, I know no

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OP CHOICE IN MARBIA6E. 87

good reason, moral or physical, why the man
should withhold himself till severi-and-thirty,
and many excellent reasons against it. Some
few years of seniority on the part of the man,
I do conceive to be desirable ; and on this, as
wiell as on other grounds, the woman should
marry young ; for if the woman were to be
past her first youth and the man to be some
years older, it follows that the man would
remain longer unmarried than it is good for
him to be alone. On the point of seniority,
let us listen to the Duke and Viola —

Duke, " Let still the woman take

An older than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her hnsband's heart.
Por, boy, however we do praise ourselves.
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn
Than women's are.

Fiola. I think it well, my Lord.

Duke, Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent:
For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour."*

The woman should marry, therefore, rather

• " Twelfth Night," Act ii. Sc. 4.

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88 OF CHOICE IN MABRIAGE.

before than after that culminatmg period of
personal charm, which, varying much in
different individuals, is but a short period in
any, and occurs in early youth in almost all.
She should marry between twenty and thirty
years of age, but nearer the former than the
latter period. Now the man at such an age
would probably be too light for the man's
part in marriage; and the more so when
marrying a wife equally young. For when
two very young people are joined together in
matrimony, it is as if one sweet-pea should
be put as a prop to another. The man, there-
fore, may be considered most marriageable
when he is nearer thirty than twenty, or
perhaps when he is a little beyond thirty. If
his marriage be deferred much longer, there
is some danger of his becoming hardened in
celibacy. In the case of a serious and
thoughtfiil man, it need not be deferred so
long ; for in such a case, a remark made in a
letter of Lord Bacon's will probably be veri-
fied — that a man finds himself seven years
older the day after his marriage.

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OP CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 89

In these times men are disposed, I think,
to be rather too tardy than too precipitate in
marrying. Worldly prudence is strong in
us now, even to a vice ; and a competency,
or what is estimated to be a competency, is
not attainable at a very early age. A circle
of friends and relatives commonly resent, as
an injury to themselves, a poor marriage con-
tracted at an early age; arid not without
reason, if the virtues of the parties con-
tracting it are not such as to justify it. But
that will be prudence in a prudent man which
is imprudence in another ; and one thing is
certain, that the prudence which postpones
marriage is excessive to a vice when it in-
volves other vices, and presents temptations
less likely to be resisted than those to which
a poor marriage lies open.

There are other motives and circumstances
besides those connected with prudence, which,
in the case of men, militate against early
marriages. If their first passion (as it hap-
pens with most first passions) have issued in
a disappointment, and if they have passed

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90 OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE.

through their disappomtment without being
betrayed, by the heart's abhorrence of its
vacuum, into some immediate marriage of
the pis-aUer kind, resorted to for mere pur-
poses of repose, they will probably find that
a first seizure of the kind guarantees them
for a certain number of years against a
second. In the meantime, the many interests,
aspirations, and alacrities of youth, its keen
pursuits and its fresh friendships, fill up the
measure of life, and make the single heart
sufficient to itself. It is when these things
have partly passed away and life has lost
something of its original brightness, that men
begin to feel an insufficiency and a want. I
have known it to be remarked by a Roman
Catholic priest, as the result of much observa-
tion of life amongst his brethren, that the
pressure of their vow of celibacy was felt
most severely towards forty years of age.

If a man have faitly passed that period
without manning or attempting marriage,
then, I think, or very soon after, he may con-
clude that there is no better fortune in store

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OP CHOICE IN MABRIAGE. 91

for him, and dispose himself finally for the
life celibate.

" Till age, refrain not ; but if old, refrain,"

says one of the shrewdest of the unpoetical
poets * And this abstinence firom marriage
on the part of old men, is to be enjoined, not
only on their own account, but on account of
the offspring to which such marriages may
give birth. The sort of age in youth and
the weakness of constitution which is observ-
able in the offspring of old men, involves
national as well as individual evil, because it
tends to degeneracy of the race ; and amongst
the Romans, who were careful of their breed,
there was a law, the Lex Pappia, which
forbade the marriage of a man of more than
sixty years of age with a woman of less than
fifty. If the old man have male issue, there
will generally be further the evils to the son
of an ill-tended minority and a premature
independence.
The marriages of old men to young women

Crabbe.

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92 OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE.

are, for the most part, as objectionable in
their motives as in their results; and the
mistake of such marriages is generally as
great as the moral misfeasance. There is no
greater error of age than to suppose that it
can recover the enjoyment of youth by pos-
sessing itself of what youth only can enjoy ;
and age will never appear so unlovely as
when it is seen with such an ill-sorted
accompaniment —

" A chaplet of forced flowers on Winter's brow
Seems not less inharmonious to me
Than the untimely snow on the green leaf."

For the young women who make such
marriages there is sometimes more to be said
than for the old men. When the motives
are mercenary there is nothing to be said
for them; and but little when the case is
one of weak consent to the mercenary base-
ness of parents, or when they sacrifice them-
selves (as they will sometimes allege) in a
rich alliance for the relief of a large family
of destitute brothers and sisters. These are
but beggarly considerations, and might be

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OF CHOICE IN MABBIAGE. 93

equally pled in defence of a less disguised
prostitution. But a case will sometimes
occur in which a young woman is dazzled
by great achievements or renown ; and what
is heroical or illustrious may inspire a feeling
which, distinct though it be from that which
youth inspires in youth, is yet not unimagi-
native, and may suflBce to sanctify the
marriage vow. And there is another case,
not certainly to be altogether vindicated and
yet not to be visited with much harshness of
censure, in which a woman who has had her
heart broken, seeks, in this sort of marriage,
such an asylum as, had she been a Roman
Catholic, she might have found in a convent.
Marriages of the old with the old are rare,
and are thought by some people to be ridi-
culous. They do not, however, fall within
the purview of the Lex Pappia, or of any
other prohibition that I am acquainted with,
and I hardly know why they should be so
unfrequent as they are. Solitude is ill suited
to old age, and the course of circumstances
tends too often to leave the old in solitude.

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94 OF CHOICE IN MABMAGE.

Cases must be continually occurring in which
it would be for the comfort and happiness of
old friends of different sexes to live together;
and if they cannot do so conveniently or
creditably without being married, I know
not why they should be laughed at for mar-
rying. It must be, no doubt, a totally differ-
ent connection from that which is formed in
earlier life ; and it is one which might be,
perhaps, more fitly ratified by a civil con-
tract than by a religious ceremony; but
the lawful rights of a wife are necessary to
the female fidend, in order that she may be
regarded with due respect by her husband's
relatives and by the world, and in order that
she may have authority in her household:
and if the marriage be ascribed to this
reasonable motive, instead of supposing any
which would be unreasonable and ridiculous,
it may be regarded, I think, as a wise and
commendable species of arrangement.

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OF WISDOM.

Wisdom is not the same with understand-
ing, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity, sense,
or prudence — not the same with any one of
these ; neither will all these together make it
up. It is that exercise of the reason into
which the heart enters — a structure of the
understanding rising out of the moral and
spiritual nature.

It is for this cause that a high order of
wisdom — that is, a highly intellectual
wisdom — is still more rare than a high
order of genius. When they reach the very
highest order they are one ; for each includes
the other, and intellectual greatness is
matched with moral strength. But they
hardly ever reach so high, inasmuch as great
intellect, according to the ways of Provi-
dence, almost always brings along with it

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96 OF WISDOM.

great infinnities — or, at least, infirmities
which appear great owing to the scale of
operation; and it is certainly exposed to
unusual temptations ; for as power and pre-
eminence lie before it, so ambition attends it,
which, whilst it determines the will and
strengthens the activities, inevitably weakens
the moral fabric.

Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even
when the quality of the ambition is intellec-
tual. For ambition, even of this quality, is
but a form of self-love, which, seeking grati-
fication in the consciousness of intellectual
power, is too much delighted with the exer-
cise to have a single and paramount regard
to the end; and it is not according to
wisdom that the end — ^that is, the moral
and spiritual consequences — ^should suffer
derogation in favour of the intellectual
means. God is love, and God is light;
whence it results that love is light ; and it is
only by following the effluence of that light,
that intellectual power issues into wisdom.
The intellectual power which loses that light

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OF WISDOM. 97

and issues into intellectual pride, is out of
the way to wisdom, and will not attain even
to intellectual greatness. For though many
arts, gifts, and attainments may co-exist in
much force with intellectual pride, an open
greatness cannot ; and of all the correspond-
encies between the moral and intellectual
nature, there is none more direct and imme-
diate than that of humility with capacious-
ness. If pride of intellect be indulged, it will
mark out to a man conscious of great talents
the circle of his own intellectual experiences
as the only one in which he can keenly
recognise and appreciate the intellectual uni-
verse ; and there is no order of intellectual
men which stands in a more strict lunitation
than that of the man who cannot conceive
what he does not contain. Such men will
oftentimes dazzle the world, and exercise in
their day and generation much influence on
the many whose range is no wider than
theirs and whose force is less ; but the want
of spiritual and imaginative wisdom will stop
them there; and the understandings from

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98 OF WISDOM.

which mankind will seek a permanent and
authentic guidance, will be those which
have been exalted by love and enlarged by
humility.

If wisdom be defeated by ambition and
self-love when these are occupied with the
mere inward consciousness of intellectual
power, still more is it so when they are
eager to obtain recognition and admiration of
it from without. Men who are accustomed
to write or speak for effect, may write or
speak what is wise from time to time, because
they may be capable of thinking and intel-
lectually adopting what is wise: but they
will not be wise men ; because the love of
Grod, the love of man, and the love of truth
not having the mastery with them, the growth
and structure Of their minds must needs be
perverted if not stunted. Thence it is that
so many men are observed to speak wisely
and yet act foolishly ; they are not deficient
in their understandings, but the wisdom of
the heart is wanting to their ends and objects,
and to those feelings which have the direction

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OF WISDOM. 99

of their acts. And if they do speak wisely,
it is not because they are wise ; for the per-
manent shape and organisation of the mind
proceeds from what we feel and do, and not
from what we speak, write, or think. There
is a great volume of truth in the admonition
which teaches us that the spirit of obedience
is to prepare the way, action to come next,
and that knowledge is not precedent to these,
but consequent : '* Do the will of my Father
which is in heaven, and thou shalt know of
the doctrine."

Those who are much conversant with intel-
lectual men will observe, I think, that the
particular action of self-love by which their
minds are most frequently warped from
wisdom, is that which belongs to a pride and
pleasure taken in the exercise of the argu-
mentative faculty; whence it arises that
that faculty is enabled to assert a predomi-
nance over its betters. With such men, the
elements of a question which will make
effect in argument, — ^those which are, so far
as they go, demonstrative, — ^will be rated
p 2

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100 OF WISDOM.

above their value ; and those which are matter
of proportion and degree, not palpable, pon-
derable, or easily or shortly producible in
words, or which are matters of moral estima-
tion and optional opinion, will go for less
than they are worth, because they are not
available to ensure the victory or grace the
triumph of a disputant.

In some discussions, a wise man will be
silenced by argumentation, only because he
knows that the question should be determined
by considerations which lie beyond the reach
of argumentative exhibition. And indeed,
in all but purely scientific questions, argu-
ments are not to be submitted to by the
judgment as first in command ; rather they
are to be used as auxiliaries and pioneers;
the judgment should profit by them to the
extent of the services they can render, but
after their work is done, it should come to
its conclusions upon its own firee survey.
I have seldom known a man with great
powers of argumentation abundantly in-
dulged, who could attain to an habitually

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OF WISDOM. 101

just judgment. In our courts of law, where
advocacy and debate are most in use, abi-
lity, sagacity, and intellectual power flourish
and abound, whilst wisdom is said to have
been disbarred. In our houses of parlia-
ment the case is somewhat otherwise; the
silent members, and those who take but
little part in debate, and indeed the coun-
try at large which may be said to listen,
exercise some subduing influence over the
spirit of argumentation, and the responsi-
bility for results restrains it, so that here
its predominance is much less than in the
courts of law; yet even in the houses of
parliament wisdom has been supposed to
have less to say to the proceedings than a
certain species of courage.

Ambition and self-love will commonly
derange that proportion between the active
and passive understanding which is essential
to wisdom, and will lead a man to value
thoughts and opinions less according to their
worth and truth, than according as they are
his own or another's. The objection made

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102 OP WISDOM.

by Brutus to Cicero in the play, — ^that he
" would never follow anything which other
men began " — ^points to one corruption oper-
ated by self-love upon a great understanding.
Some preference a man may reasonably
accord to what is the growth of his own
mind apart from its absolute value, on the
ground of its specific usefulness to himself;
for what is native to the soil will thrive
better and bear more fruit than what has
been transplanted : but, on the other hand, if a
man would enlarge the scope and diversify the
kinds of his thoughts and contemplations, he
should not think too much to apprehend nor
talk too much to listen. He should cherish
the thoughts of his own begetting with a
loving care and a temperate discipline — ^they
are the family of his mind and its chief
reliance — but he should give a hospitable
reception to guests and to travellers with
stories of far countries, and the family should
not be suffered to crowd the doors.

Even without the stimulant of self-love,
some minds, owing to a natural redundance

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OF WISDOM. 103

of activity and excess of velocity and fer-
tility, cannot be sufllciently passive to be
wise. A capability to take a thousand views
of a subject is hard to be reconciled with
directness and singleness of judgment; and
he who can find a great deal to say for any
view, wUl not often go the straight road to
the one view that is right. If subtlety be
added to exuberance, the judgment is still
more endangered —

^' Tell Wit how oft she wrangles
In tickel points of niceness,
Tell Wisdom she entangles
Herself in over-wiseness." *

But when self-love is not at the root, there
is better hope for wisdom. Nature presents
us with various walks of intellectual life, and
such a selection may be made as shall render
a disproportion of the active to the passive
intellect less dangerous. Speculative wisdom
will suffer less by excess of thinking than
practical wisdom. There are fields to be
fought in which a wide range is more essen-

♦ Sir Walter Raleigh.

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104 OF WISDOM.

tial than an unerring aim. In some regions
we are to cultivate the surface ; in others to
sink the shaft. No one intellect can be
equally available for opposite avocations,
and where there is no interference of self-
love, wisdom will be attained through a wise
choice of work. One eminent man of our times
has said of another, that "science was his
forte, and omniscience his foible.'' But that
instance was not an extreme one. Cases
have occurred in which wisdom has suffered
total overthrow; the greatest intellect and
the greatest folly have been known to
meet; and the universalist who handles
everything and embraces nothing, has
been seen to pass into a pursuer of the
mere vanities and firivolities of intellectual
display.

If, however, a man of genius be fortunately
free from ambition, there is yet another enemy
which will commonly lie in wait for his wis-
dom ; to wit, a great capacity of enjoyment.
This generally accompanies genius, and is,
perhaps, the greatest of all trials to the

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moral and spiritual heart. It was a trial
too severe even for Solomon,

"whose heart, though large.
Beguiled by fair Idolatresses fell
To idols foul." *

The temptation by which such a man is
assailed consists in imagining that he has
within himself and by virtue of his tempera-
ment, sources of joy altogether independent
of conduct and circumstances. It is true
that he has these sources on this uncon-
ditional tenure for a time ; and it is owing
to this very truth that his futurity is in
danger, — not in respect of wisdom only, but
also in respect of happiness. And if we look
to recorded examples, we shall find that a
great capacity of enjoyment does ordinarily
bring about the destruction of enjoyment
in its own ulterior consequences, having
uprooted wisdom by the way.

A man of genius, so gifted — or, let us rather
say, so tempted — lives until the consumma-
tion approaches, as if he possessed some elixir

* Paradise Lost.
F 3

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106 OF WISDOM.

or phylactery, reckless of consequences, be-
cause his happiness, being so inward to his
nature, seems to be inherent and indefeasible.
Wisdom is not wanted. The intellect, per-
haps, amidst the abundance of its joys, re-
joices in wise contemplations ; but wisdom is
not adopted and domesticated in the mind,
owing to the fearlessness of the heart. For
wisdom will have no hold on the heart in
which joy is not tempered by fear. The fear
of the Lord, we know, is the beginning of it ;
and some hallowing and chastening influences
of fear will always go along with it. Fear,
indeed, is the mother of foresight ; spiritual
fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the
grave ; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls
short ; but without fear there is neither the
one foresight nor the other ; and as pain has
been truly said to be the deepest thing in our
nature, so is it fear that will bring the depths
of our nature within our knowledge : —

'* Wliat sees rejoidng genius in the Earth?
A thousand meadows with a thousand herds
Freshly luxuriant in a Mayday dawn ;
A thousand ships that caracole and prance

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OF WISDOM. 107

Witli freights of gold upon a nxamy sea ;

A thousand gardens gladdened by all flowers.

That on the air breathe out an odorous beauty."

Genius may see all this and rejoice ; but it
will not exalt itself into wisdom, unless it
see also the meadow in the livid hues of
winter, the ship under bare poles, and the
flower when the beauty of the fashion of it
perishes.

It is true, however, that the cases are rare
and exceptional in which this dangerous
capacity of enjoyment is an unbroken habit,
so as to bring a steady and continuous pres-
sure upon the moral mind. A great capacity
of suffering belongs to genius also ; and it has
been observed that an alternation of joyful-
ness and dejection is quite as characteristic
of the man of genius as intensity in either
kind. Doubtless these alternations will
greatly enlarge his knowledge both of Man
and of the universe. The many moods of his
own mind will give him a penetrating and
experienced insight into many minds ; and
he will contemplate the universe and all that

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108 OF WISDOM.

goes on in it from many points of view.
Moreover, it is by re-action from the extreme
of one state, that the mind receives the most
powerful impulse towards another — in resili-
ence, that it has its plenary force. But
though these alternations of excess do thus
enlarge and enrich the understanding and
minister to wisdom so far forth, they must
yet, by the shocks which they occasion to the
moral will, do injury on the whole to that
composite edifice, built up of the moral and
rational mind, in which Wisdom has her
dwelUng. The injury is not so great as in
the other case: better are winter and sum-
mer for the mind than the torrid zone —
feasts and fasts than a perpetual plenty — but
either way the temperament of genius is
hardly ever favourable to wisdom; that is,
the Highest order of genius, or that which
includes wisdom, is of all things the most
rare.

On the other hand, wisdom without genius
(a fiar more precious gift than genius with-
out wisdom) is, by God's blessing upon the

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OF WISDOM. 109

humble and loving heart, though not as often
met with as " the ordinary of Nature's sale-
work," yet not altogether rare; for the
desire to be right will go a great way towards
wisdom. Intellectual guidance is the less
needed where there is little to lead astray
— where humility lets the heart loose to
the impulses of love. That we can be wise
by impulse will seem a paradox to some;
but it is a part of that true doctrine which
traces wisdom to the moral as well as the
intellectual mind, and more surely to the
former than to the latter — one of those
truths which is recognised when we look
into our nature through the clearness of a
poetic spirit : —

" Moments tliere are in life — alas, how few 1 —
When casting cold prudential doubts aside,
We take a generous impulse for our guide, •

And following promptly what the heart thinks best,
Commit to Providence the rest ;

Sure that no after-reckoning will arise

Of shame or sorrow, for the heart is wise.
And happy they who thus in faith obey

Their better nature : err sometimes they may.
And some sad thoughts lie heavy in the breast.

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110 OF WISDOM.

Such as by hope deceived are left behind ;
But like a shadow these will pass away
From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind.*' *

The doctrine of wisdom by impulse is no
doubt liable to be much misused and misap-
plied. The right to rest upon such a creed
accrues only to those who have so trained
their nature as to be entitled to trust it. It
is the impulse of the habitual heart which
the judgment may fairly follow upon occa-
sion — of the heart which, being habitually
humble and loving, has been framed by love
to wisdom. Some such fashioning love will
always effect ; for love cannot exist without
solicitude, solicitude brings thoughtfulness,
and it is in a thoughtful love that the wis-
dom of the heart consists. The impulse of
such a heart will take its shape and guidance
from the very mould in which it is cast,
without any application of the reason express ;
and the most inadvertent motion of a wise
heart will for the most part be wisely di-
rected ; providentially, let us rather say ; for

* Southey's Oliver Neuman,

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OF WISDOM. Ill

Providence has no more eminent seat than
in the wisdom of the heart.

Wisdom by impulse, then, is to be trusted
in by those only who have habitually used
their reason to the full extent of its powers
in forming the heart and cultivating the
judgment, whilst, owing to its constitu-
tional deficiency, or to its peculiarity (for
the reason may be unserviceable from other
causes than deficiency), they are conscious
that their judgment is likely to be rather
perplexed than cleared by much think-
ing on questions on which they are called
upon to act or decide. Those in whom the
meditative faculty is peculiarly strong, will
often find themselves in this predicament;
witness Christopher Hervie's complaint : —

'* One while I think ; and then I am in pain
To think how to unthink that thought again." *

And they whose deliberative judgment is
weak and indecisive fi-om a natural debility
of the reason, may act from impulse, and even
though the consequences be evil, may be held

♦ The Synagogue, 41.

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112 OF WISDOM.

to be wise according to their kind. For the
course they took may have been the wisest
for them, being founded upon a just measure-
ment of the insufficiencies of their under-
standing. And those who can take this just
measurement, and holding their opinions
with due diffidence, yet act in love and faith
and without fear, may be wise of heart,
though erring in judgment ; and though not
gifted with intellectual wisdom, may yet be
deemed to have as much understanding as
innocence has occasion for.

Upon this, however, the question will arise,
whether errors of the judgment are, as such,
absolutely void of offence ; and whether he
who has committed them may look back
upon them, whatever may have been their
consequences, without any compunctious
visitings. An eminent statesman is said to
have averred, that when he was conscious of
having taken a decision with all due care
and consideration, to the best of his judg-
ment and with the best intentions, he never
looked back to it with a moment's regret.

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OF WISDOM. 113

though the result might prove it to have been
wholly erroneous. This is a frame of mind
highly conducive to civil courage, and there-
fore not without its advantages in political
life. But it is not equally conducive to wis-
dom. Nor, perhaps, in this unqualified form,
is it to be altogether vindicated in morals.
At all events, so much regret might be felt,
if no more, as would suffice to awaken some
self-questionings, not merely as to the spe-
cific moral rectitude accompanying or proxi-
mately preceding the particular act, but as
to that general and life-long training of the
heart to wisdom, which gives the best assur-
ance of specific results, and of which, there-
fore, specific failures should suggest the
deficiency. Some short-comings of this kind
there must of course be in all human beings,
and they should be at all times aware of it ;
but it is in the order of Nature that this con-
sciousness should be quickened from time to
time by the contemplation of evil conse-
quences arising from specific errors of judg-
ment, however innocent in themselves ; which

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114 OF WISDOM.

contemplation, accompanied with a natural
regret, constitutes what may be called a
repentance of the understanding — ^not easily
to be escaped by a plain man, nor properly
to be repudiated by a philosopher.

Yet when the consequences of an error of
judgment are irremediable, how often are
those who would animadvert upon it, met
with the admonition to "let the past be
past : '' as if the past had no relations with
the future ; and as if the experience of our
errors of judgment, and the inquisition into
their sources, did not, by its very painfulness,
effect the deepest cultivation of the under-
standing, — ^that cultivation whereby what
is irremediable is itself converted into a
remedy.

The main scope and design of this disqui-
sition having been to inculcate that wisdom
is still more essentially a moral and spiritual
than it is an intellectual attribute, that genius
can mount to wisdom only by Jacob's ladder,
and that knowledge can only be converted
into wisdom by an application of the heart, —

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OF WISDOM. 115

I cannot better close it than with that decla-
ration of the nature of wisdom which is deli-
vered in the 28th chapter of the book of Job : —

" Whence then cometh wisdom ? and where
is the place of understanding ?

"Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all
living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.

*' Destruction and death say, we have heard
the fame thereof with our ears.

" God understandeth the way thereof, and
he knoweth the place thereof.

"For he looketh to the ends of the earth,
and seeth under the whole Heaven ;

" To make the weight for the winds ; and
he weigheth the waters by measure.

" When he made a decree for the rain, and
a way for the lightning of the thunder :

"Then did he see it, and declare it; he
prepared it, yea, and searched it out.

" And unto man he said. Behold, the fear of
the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from
evil is understanding."

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CHILDREN.

Fkom the complaints which everybody
brings against everybody in the matter of the
management of chUdren, one might be led to
suppose that such a thing as good manage-
ment of them did not exist amongst man-
kind. And no doubt this is so far true, that
on a subject on which so many and such
various kinds of errors may be committed,
the best management can be but very imper-
fect, and those who are complained of should
be willing to listen, in the assurance that real
errors there are, and for the chance of those
being the errors that are hit upon and
pointed out.

But remonstrance and admonition, whether
listened to or not, seem in general to be of as
little avail on these questions as theories and

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CHILDREN. 117

doctrines; and from the uselessness of all
these, and from the fact that thoughtful and
cultivated people are seen, not nnfrequently,
to get as wrong as others, it may be inferred
that the most essential qualifications for
training a child well, are not of a nature to
be communicated by books or lectures on
education. They are, 1st, The desire to be
right in the matter ; 2nd, Sense ; 3rd, Kind-
ness ; and 4th, Firmness.

Where these are wanting, the wisest admo-
nitions in the world will be of no other use
than to relieve the mind of the person who
throws them away.

Theories, however, seem to have more
power to pervert the natural understanding,
in this case, than they have to enlighten it.
The doctrine of an eminent writer (of a gene-
ration now nearly gone), that a child should
be reasoned into obedience, had, in its day,
more of a misleading efficacy than might
have been thought possible; and many a
parent was induced to believe that a child
should be taught to give its obedience, not

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118 CHILDBEN.

because it was obedience, but because the
thing ordered was reasonable; the Uttle
casuists and controversialists being expected
to see the reason of things as readily in real
life, as in the dialogues between Tutor and
Charles. The common sense of mankind
has now made an end of this doctrine, and it
is known now, as it was before the transit
of that eminent person, that obedience —
prompt, implicit, unreasoning, and almost
unconscious — is the first thing to be taught
to a child, and that he can have no peace for
his soul without it.

The notion of setting up the reason to be
the pivot of humanity from the cradle for-
wards, belongs to a generation of fallacies
which have returned to the dust firom
which they came ; but it included one error
in theories of education which will be found
to belong to many that are still extant : the
error of assuming that the parent is to be
perfect. Under the reasoning regimen, what
was to happen when the parent's reasons
were bad ? And in like manner, with respect

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GHILDBEN. 119

to many less unnatural systems which are
recoDMnended as if they were of universal
appUcability, the question may be asked.
Will most parents be competent to give effect
to them ? And, bearing in mind the not in-
considerable number of mankind who labour
under imperfections of the understanding or
other disqualifying defects, I believe we shall
find that a few strong instincts and a few
plain rules, are all that can be appealed to
for general guidance in the management of
children.

That first and foremost rule of exacting
obedience, is so far from being subject to the
condition of showing reasons, that I believe
a parent with a strong will, although it be a
perverse one, will train a child better than a
parent of a reasonable mind, tainted by infir-
mity of purpose. For as " obedience is better
than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of
rams," so an authority which is absolute by
virtue of its own inherent strength, is better
than one which is shaken by a reference to
ends and purposes, and by reasonable doubts

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120 CHILDREN.

as to whether they are the best and most
useful. Nor will the parents' perversity,
unless it be unkind or ill-tempered, occasion
the child half so much uneasiness in the one
case, as the child will suffer from those per-
versities of its own which will spring up in
the other? For habits of instant and mecha-
nical obedience are those that give rest to the
child, and spare its health and temper ; whilst
a recusant or dawdling obedience will keep it
distracted in propensity, bringing a perpetual
pressure on its nerves and consequently on
its mental and bodily strength.

To enforce this kind of obedience our most
efficacious instrument is a clear and deter-
minate manner; because with children at
least this is the most significant expression of
an authoritative will. But it is an instru-
ment which those only can employ who
are authoritative by temperament; for an
assumed manner, or one which is not true to
the temperament, will be of no avail. Those
parents who are not gifted with this temper-
ament and this manner, must needs, if they

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CHILDKEN. 121

do their duty have recourse to punishments ;
of which, in the case of most children, those
are best which are sharp and soon over.
And let not the parents think that by a just
and necessary amount of punishment they
run any risk of impairing the child's aflfec-
tions. The risk is far greater of impairing
them by indulgence. A spoilt child never
loves its mother; never at least with the
same measure of love as if it were unspoilt.
And there is in human nature an essential
though somewhat mysterious connection of
love with fear, which, though chiefly recog-
nised in the relations between man and God^
is also discernible in the relations between
man and man, and especially in those between
parent and child.

Love in either relation is deepened by some
degree — ^not oppressive or too disturbing —
some slight degree of fear; and the very
truth of the text, that *^ perfect love casteth
out fear," shows that fear must be there be-
fore the love is made perfect. Therefore the
parent who shrinks from inflicting just and

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122 CHILDREN.

proper punishments upon a child, deprives
that child not only of the rest to be found in
duty and obedience, but also of the blessings
of a deeper love.

There is another way not much adverted
to by blind parents, in which children are
injured by undue indulgence. It prevents
them from benefiting by the general tendency
of mankind to have kind and friendly feelings
towards children. Such feelings are checked
and abated when it is seen that children are
unduly favoured by their parents. And when
the rights and comforts of others are sacri-
ficed for their sake, instead of being objects
for the protection and good ofBices of all
around them, they become odious in the same
manner as princes' favourites do, and their
parents' sins are visited upon them.

Then the repugnance which people feel
towards the objects of an unjust partiality,
provokes them to exaggerate the demerits of
the children, — ^not probably to the face of the
parents, but in a way to go round to them, —
whereupon the parents come in with some

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CHILDREN. 123

show of reason as protectors of injured inno-
cence, and fortify themselves in their own
delusions by detecting injustice in the views
of others. It is not the nature of mankind to
be unjust to children, and where parents find
this injustice to prevail, they should look
for the source of it in their children or in
themselves.

Indeed, it is the nature of mankind to be
only too kind to children, and to take too
much notice of them ; and this is a reason
for not throwing them too much in the way
of strangers and casual visitors- When the
visitors are intelligent, and the parents are
not the sort of people to whom flattery is
acceptable, the children may be no worse for
meeting the visitors, though they should
never be sent for to be shown. But when the
parents are known to have open ears for the
praises of their children, there are hardly
any strangers so carefiil and conscientious
as not to say what is expected of them^ and
very many will carry their blandishments to
an extreme of grossness and falseness. A

g2

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124 CHILDREN.

considerate visitor will observe the conduct
of a judicious parent towards a child, and be
guided by it ; but the instances are far more
frequent in which the folly of injudicious
parents is unscrupulously abetted by the
levity of others; and the only consolation for
a rational bystander is that the children may
have more sense than their flatterers and
more discernment than their parents, and be
unflattered and ill-pleased (as will sometimes
happen) by these coarse attempts at adula-
tion. In these remarks I refer of course to
children, not babies. As long as children
are young enough to be in the nurse's arms>
they are a fair mark for all manner of flat-
teries, which, if they mean nothing, are to
be excused in as much as they do nothing.
There is an old proverb which says that
" many a child is kissed for the nurse's sake ;"
and if it be in the nurse's arms there is no
harm done.

It is selfishness on the part of parents
which gives rise to undue indulgence of
children, — ^the selfishness of sacrificing those

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CHILDREN. 125

for whom they care less to those for whom
they care more; and the selfishness of the
parent for the child will invariably produce
selfishness of the child for himself. A spoilt
child is never generous. And selfishness is
induced in a child not only by too much
indulgence, but even by too much attention.
It will be most for a child's happiness and
well-being, both present and to come, that he
should feel himself, in respect to comforts
and enjoyments, the most insignificant person
in the house. In that case he will have his
own resources, which will be more available
to him than any which perpetual attention
can minister; he will be subject to fewer
discontents ; and his affections will be more
cultivated by the occasional tokens of kind-
ness which a contented child will naturally
receive in suflBicient abundance, than they
would be by continual endeavours to make
him happy.

x4nd if continual attention to making him
happy will not produce happiness, neither
will continual attention to making him good

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126 CHILDREN.

produce goodness. For if the child feels that
there is some one incessantly occupied with
his happiness and goodness, he will come to
be incessantly occupied with himself. Some-
thing must be left in a spirit of faith and
hope to Nature and God's providence. Parents
are the instruments, but they are not to be
all in all. Room must be left for some
liberty of action, for many an untended im-
pulse, for self-reliance, for temptations and
trials, with their natural results of victory
with self-respect, of defeat with remorse. By
such treatment the child's moral nature,
being amply exercised, will be seasonably
strengthened; and when he comes into the
world as a man, he will come with a man's
weapons of defence ; whereas if the child be
constantly watched and kept out of harm's
way, he will come into the world a moral
weakling. I was once present when an old
mother, who had brought up a large family of
children with eminent success, was asked by
a young one what she would recommend in,
the case of some children who were too

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CHILDREN. 127

anxiously educated, and her reply was — " I
think, my dear, a little wholesome neglect."

For similar reasons it may be well that
children should not be hedged in with any
great number of rules and regulations. Such
as are necessary to be established, they
should be required implicitly to observe.
But there should be none that are super-
fluous. It is only in rich families, where there
is a plentiful attendance of governesses and
nurses, that many rules can be enforced;
and I believe that the constant attentions of
governesses and nurses is one of the greatest
moral disadvantages to which the children of
the rich are exposed.

I have heard a multiplicity of petty regu-
lations defended, on the ground that it was a
constant exercise of the child's sense of right
and wrong. But will a child be really the
better for always thinking about whether he
does right or wrong, that is, always thinking
about himself? Were it not well that, for
hours together, no question of right or wrong
should arise in his path? or at least none

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128 CHILDREN.

that demands from him more than a half-
mechanical attention ? For the conscience
of a child may easily be worn out, both by
too much pressure and by over-stunulation.
I have known a child to have a conscience
of such extraordinary and premature sensi-
bility, that at seven years of age she would
be made ill by remorse for a small fault-
She was brought up by persons of excellent
understanding, with infinite care and affec-
tion, and yet, by the time she was twenty
years of age, she had next to no conscience
and a hard heart. A person who had some
experience of precocious consciences once
observed to me, in respect to those children
who are said to be too good and too clever
to live, that it was very desirable they should
not.

These views are not, of course, to be
pushed too far. A child's conscience should
always have that sufficiency of exercise
which due discipline and the occasions of
life will not fail to supply, without factitious
duties or needless rules. And with respect

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CHILDREN. 129

to the treatment of the conscience on the
point of sensibility, natural constitutions are
so diverse that it is difficult to speak gene-
xally ; but though I would not have it much
stimulated or unintermittingly worked upon
— ^though I would avoid to intimidate or
intenerate the conscience — I do not agree
with those who think that the appeals to it
should be invariably made with a judicial
calmness, and that all punishments should
be inflicted dispassionately. Moral disap-
probation on the part of parents towards
children (as indeed on the part of men
towards men throughout all relations of life)
should not operate mechanically, bringing
with it, like a calculating machine, a propor-
tionate evil to be sufibred as a consequence
of every evil act. It should operate accord-
ing to its own human nature, as a matter of
emotion, not only bringing an evil to be
suffered, but a moral sentiment to be recog-
nised and taken to heart — ^a passion which
should strike upon the moral sense.
According to the nature of the child and
o3

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130 CHILDREN.

of the fault, the emotion should be some-
times more of sorrow than of anger, some-
times more of anger than of sorrow. But it
were better for the child's conscience that
there should be some errors of emotion, than
that punishments should be cold and dry.
A parent should " be angry and sin not ;" that
is, the anger should be a just and moral
anger, and grave and governed; but at the
same time it should be the real anger of
flesh and blood, and not the mere vis motrix
of an instrument of discipline. In this way
the moral sentiments of the parent, if they
be virtuous, generous and just, will be im-
parted to the child : for it is a truth never to
be lost sight of in the treatment of our
children, that their characters are formed,
not by what we do, think, or teach, but by
what we feel and by what we are.

With respect to the intellectual cultivation
of children, it is very important that the
body, mind, and moral sense of the child
should proceed in their growth proportion-
ately and pari passu : —

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CHILDREN. 131

" For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
In thews and bulk ; but as this temple waxes.
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal." *

As this temple waxes let it be ; not before
this temple waxes. Whichsoever of these
constituents of the human being, the body,
the intellect and the moral sense^ shall
shoot forth prematurely and in advance of
the others, will run a great risk of being
nipped and blighted. The intellectual is, of
the three — in these times at least — that
which is most liable to premature develop-
ment. The evil consequences of such deve-
lopment have been very generally perceived,
and many maxims are afloat against over-
education ; but the ambition of parents is
commonly too strong for their wisdom and
prudence, and the over-education proceeds,
the maxims notwithstanding. And schools
and colleges and all tutors and teachers
being governed by the same spirit, it is diffi-
cult for a wise parent to give effect to wise

* Hamlet.

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132 CHILDREN.

views, even when he heartily desires it. One
rule, however, it is in his own hands to
carry out, and this is, if he talk much to his
children, not to talk intellectually. The in-
tellectual talk of adults is apt, not only to sti-
mulate the child's intellect to eflforts beyond
its strength, but also to overlay many intellec-
tual tastes which have their natural place
in childhood and which it is good for every
mind to have passed through. It is best for
a child that he should admire cordially what
he does admire ; but if the intellectual tastes
and criticisms of the adult mind are brought
to bear upon him, he will try to admire
what he cannot and fail to admire what he
might.

On the other hand, I would not be under-
stood to recommend the sort of jocular non-
sense which some intellectual parents will
have recourse to in order to place their con-
versation on a level with a child's under-
standing ; nor do I observe that children are
fond of it, or at all flattered by it, but rather
the contrary. For it is a mistake to suppose

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CHILDREN. 133

that any joke is good enough for a child.
Intelligent children, if not absolutely fasti-
dious as to jokes, (which certainly all children
are as to taste and manners), will not, how-
ever, accept as complacently as might be
wished, the mere good-natured disposition to
make them merry, nor can they respond in
the manner that is sometimes expected from
them, to every well-meant eflfbrt of heavy
gambolling and forced facetiousness. What-
ever is most simple and natural is most
pleasing to a child ; and if the parent be not
naturally light and gay, he had better be
grave with his children, only avoiding to be
deep or subtle in discourse.

But however parents may demean them-
selves, it is not desirable that they and their
children should be always together. Child-
ren and young people — and I should say
even adults — are not the better in their un-
derstandings for an exclusive association
with their superiors in intellect. Such asso-
ciation should be occasional, not constant.
The inferior mind so associated may possibly

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134 CHUDBEN.

not be of a nature to be over-excited and
over-wrought; it may be safe from those
evils through defect of spontaneous force
and activity : but in that case another evil
arises ; it is led to adopt its opinions instead
of thinking them, and finds a short cut to
posts to which it would be better that it
should fight its way. In the case of a young
man who has been brought up in the con-
stant society of a parent greatly superior to
himself, it will generally be found that he
has come by his opinions, not (as is best in
youth) partly through deference to authority,
partly through conflict with equals, and
partly by spontaneous impulse, but almost
entirely by adoption, as if they were certified
facts. And this leaves the mind unenlarged
and the judgment unexercised.

There is a class of opinions, however, —
those connected with the moral and spiritual
nature, — which are to be inculcated on a
diflTerent principle from those which concern
merely the cultivation of the intellect. For
these are opinions which are not to be valued

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CHILDBEN. 135

merely as opinions, but on account of the
feelings and affections which are to be incor-
porated with them. Great as is the import-
ance of true religious doctrine— which is, as
it were, the body of religion — ^it is, neverthe-
less, an importance subsidiary and derivative ;
it is derived firom the efficacy of true religious
doctrine to cherish and protect the growth of
genuine religious feeling, which is the soul of
religion. The opinions are the organic struc-
ture ; the feelings are the vital principle. It
is for the sake of the feelings that the organi-
sation is so important; and I think, there-
fore, that religious truths, or what the parent
believes to be religious truths, should be pre-
sented to children through the conveyance of
the feelings for implicit adoption, and not as
matters to be wrought out in the under-
standing. For the primary object, which is to
fix the feeling, will be in some measure frus-
trated — the feeling will be in some measure
abated or supplanted — if more thought be
called up than the feeling of its own mere
motion will naturally generate.

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136 CHILDREN.

But if the religious beliefs of a child be not
founded in his reason, what, it maybe asked,
will become of them when the credulous sim-
plicity of childhood shall be at an end, and
the thinking faculty shall have set itself to
work? I answer that whether his beliefs
have been founded in reason, or whether
they have been founded in love, receiving
from reason merely a collateral support, it
is probable that if the child be of an active
and inquisitive understanding, the beliefs will,
at one period or another within childhood or
succeeding it, sustain some shock and trial.
But those who have taken much note of
human nature will have observed, I think,
that the reason is the weakest part of it,
(God forbid that it should not !) and that the
most reasonable opinions are seldom held
with much tenacity unless when they have
been adopted in the same way as that in
which prejudices are adopted ; that is when
they have been borne in upon the under-
standing by the feelings. Whilst I think,
therefore, that love is that constituent of

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CHILDREN. 137

faith of which a child's nature is most capa-
ble, I also believe it to be that groundwork of
faith on which all nature must rest, if it
have any resting-place at all ; and love, there-
fore, inspiring the reason, but not reduced to
the reason, must be so imparted to the child
as to animate the growing and changing
forms of doctrine throughout the several
stages of childhood;, and when childhood
shall have been left behind, it is this, and
nothing else, that can be relied upon to with-
stand the rashness of a youthful intellect,
flushed by its first discoveries. The struggle
will be great at this season in proportion to
the largeness of the nature and the force of
the elements at work ; and if a strong under-
standing should be too suddenly expanded, it
is probable that there will be some disruption
of the material fabric of doctrine in which
the spiritual feeling has hitherto had its
abode. But if the principle of love have
been cherished and made strong from the
first, the broken forms of doctrine will re-
unite, and love, with whatever strivings and

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138 CHILDBEN.

wrestlings, will find an organic faith in which
to set up its rest and secure itself firom acci-
dents of the intellect, as well as from whatso-
ever the world can do against it. And in most
cases (though not in all unhappily) the faith
will be the more strongly founded for the
conflict in which it has been engaged. It
was by Eros and Eris, by Love and Strife,
that Order was brought out of Chaos.

" I can just remember,'' says a theologian
of the last century, " when the women first
taught me to say my prayers, I used to have
the idea of a venerable old man, of a com-
posed benign countenance, with his own
hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave-
coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow
chair."* And he proceeds to say, that in
looking back to these beginnings, he is in no
way disturbed at the grossness of his infant
theology. The image thus shaped by the
imagination of the child was in truth merely
one example of the various forms and con-

* Lights of Nature and Gospel Blended, cb. iii., s. 1.

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CHILDBEN. 139

ceptionSy fitted to divers states and seasons
and orders and degrees of the religious mind
whether infant or adult, which represent
the several approximations such minds, or
minds at such seasons, can respectively
make to the completeness of faith. These
imperfect ideas should be held to be recon-
ciled and comprehended in that complete-
ness, not rejected by it; and the nearest
approximation which the greatest of human
minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded
as much nearer to the imperfection of an
infantine notion than to the fulness of truth.
The gown of flowered damask and the elbow
chair may disappear ; the anthropomorphism
of childhood may give place to the divine
incarnation of the Second Person in after
years ; and we may come to conceive of the
Deity as Milton did when his epithets were
most abstract :

" So spake the Sovean Peesence."

But after all, these are but diflFerent grades of
imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith ;

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140 CHILDBEN.

and if there be a devouter love on the part of
the child for what is pictured in his imagina-
tion as a venerable old man, than in the
philosophic poet for the ** Sovran Presence,"
the child's faith has more of the efficacy of
religious truth in it than the poet's and phi-
losopher's. What we have to take care of in
the religious training of a child is, that the
love shall be indestructible and permanent ;
so that in all the transmutations of doctrine
which after years may bring, from the palpa-
ble picturings of Tucker's infant imagination
to the "Three Incomprehensibles " of St.
Athanasius, he may preserve the same reli-
gious heart ; and whatever other knowledge
or supposed knowledge shall supervene, may
still " know that there is nothing better than
the fear of the Lord, and that there is nothing
sweeter than to take heed unto the com-
mandments of the Lord." *

* Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 27,

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THE LIFE POETIC.

Let it not be too contemplative for action,
nor too active to aflFord room and space for
contemplation. The tendency of onr times
is to bring every man of eminent abilities
into great outward activity, and thereby
perhaps in some cases to dam up and
divert to the turning of this mill or that,
the stream which should have flowed un-
broken ''in omne voluMlis cevum^ and made
itself a mirror to nature. But it may hap-
pen to a man of genius, conscious of this
tendency of the age, to throw himself too
much into the opposite extreme. His lean-
ings should be towards retirement, no doubt ;
but he should indulge them, though largely,
yet stiU with a measured freedom, not a
total abandonment

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142 THE LIFE POETIC.

" Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves" * —

should be, without question, his favourite
haunts : but he is not to forget that for the
cultivation of the highest order of poetry, it
is necessary that he should be conversant
with life and nature at large, and

" Know all qualities with a learned spirit
Of human dealings "f —

that his poetry should spring out of his life,
and that his life should abound in duties
as well as in contemplations.

For that poetic vision which is the vision
of the introverted eye alone, has but a nar-
row scope : and observation comes of action,
and most of that action which is the most
responsible. And if it be true that *' a man's
mind is sometimes wont to tell him more
than seven watchmen that sit above in an
high tower," J it is also true that that man
will hear most of aU, who hearkens to his
own mind and to the seven watchmen

* Fletcher. t Shakspeare.

X Ecclesiasticus, xxxvii. 14.

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THE LIFE POETIC. 143

besides; whilst what he hears will turn to
knowledge, and will be fixed, amplified, and
defined, in proportion as there are deeds and
consequences to follow, and sweet or bitter
finiits. He is but a child in knowledge, how-
ever versed in meditation, who has not to
act, to suffer, and to teach, as well as to
inquire and to learn. If a meditative man
be used to be taken about a city in a car-
riage or led about it by a friend, it will be
long before he knows his way in it ; but not
so if he have to go about in it by himself, still
less if he have to lead another.

If, then, a poet would entitle himself to take
the highest rank in his art, — ^to be numbered,
that is, amongst the " poets sage^' he should
be, to a moderate extent, mixed up with the
affairs of life. His mind should be not a
vessel only, but a vat. His wisdom should
be a tried and stirring wisdom. His specula-
tions should emanate from facts and events,
and his poetry should have its roots in the
common earth.

But it is difficult to say how this convers-

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144 THE LIFE POETIC.

ancy with men and affairs is to be attempted
in these times, without losing hold of the
contemplative life altogether, and becoming
involved in the inordinate activities of the
age. If a profession be adopted, there is
hardly any which leaves a moderate degree
of leisure except to men of inferior abilities.
Men of eminent abilities embarked in a pro-
fession, are placed under obligations of
exertion which they cannot escape. In
trade, strenuous efforts are enforced upon
a man by the pressure of competition ; and
trading occupations are perhaps in other
respects unsuited to a poet. Political life
is not open to him unless circumstances
be favourable ; and to a man who is alert
and excitable, (as a poet must be supposed
to be), it wiU prove too violent a diver-
sion from poetic pursuits ; and this, not from
the nature of the business only, but because it
commonly leads a man of quick sympathies
(which again must be supposed in the poet's
case,) into a good deal of social dissipation.
"If life/' says CJowley,

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tHE LIFE POETIC. 145

" If life should a well-ordered poem be,
(In which he only hits the white
Who joins true profit with the best delight,)
The more heroic strain let others take.
Mine the Pindaric way I '11 make :
The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free."

This liberty of life can not, I think, in these
days — ^and in the case of a man of eminent
abilities — ^be secured, if a man be confined
to any of the established ruts in which life is
made to run.

If, then, neither professional, commercial,
nor political life will sort well with the life
poetic, there remains little besides casual
employments and the duties which accrue in
every station, to supply a poet with the
quota of action required for his purposes.
These, however, may suffice, if they be sedu-
lously pursued. The poor are always with
us, and their afifau*s fall fitly into the hands
of educated men who have no professional
avocations. Let the poet be a man of for-
tune and the duties of a landlord are incum-
bent upon him, whilst those of a magistrate
lie before him, with the whole field of county

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146 THE LIFE POETIC.

business. If he be not a proprietor, yet one
place he must occupy — that of a parishioner,
with parochial fiinctions; and the vestry
will present, to an observant eye, as instruc-
tive an exponent of human nature, with
pretty nearly the same variety of features, as
the Lords spiritual and temporal, with Her
Majesty's faithful Commons in Parliament
assembled. Nor is the business of a parish
to be regarded as unworthy the diligent at-
tention of a man of genius. It is not impos-
sible that, from time to time, it may require
the same species of ability as the business of
an empire, and exercise the same faculties in
its adjustment ; for the amount of prudence
and sagacity needful for the successful trans-
action of business depends comparatively
little on the scale of operation. Sometimes,
indeed, the larger the scale the easier the
task.

Furthermore, a man of judgment and
ability will find, as he advances in life, that
the duties of friendship and relationship wiU
multiply upon him more than upon men of

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THE LIFE POETIC. 147

inferior capacity, if only he be found willing
to discharge them. And if he shall attain to
eminence as a poet, that, like every other
species of eminence, will bring with it no in-
considerable demands upon his activity. To
these may be added — if they should fall in
his way — casual and temporary employments
in the public service, taking care, however,
not to let that service fix itself upon him and
suck the blood out of his poetic veins. Milton
had employments of this nature ; and before
he should hold himself equipped for his great
enterprise in poetry, he deemed it indispen-
sable that to "industrious and select reading''
should be added "steady observation" and
"insight into all seemly and generous arts
and aflFairs."* Spenser and Cowley had such
employments also ; and many others might
be named, were they worthy to be named
after these.

But if a poet shall fail to find any field for
external activity which would admit also of

♦ Reason of Church Government, Book 2nd.
h2

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148 THE LIFE POETIC.

leisure and retirement, or if he shall hate an
invincible repugnance to an outward life,
(which may not unnaturally be his predica-
ment), then it behoves him the more to place
his life under a well-devised discipline, in
order that it may be, if not externally active,
yet orderly and sedulous. For by how much
a man shall reserve himself to a contem-
plative life, by so much will he need a more
constant and watchful self-regulation in the
conduct of it ; and by so much, also, will the
task of self-regulation be difllcult and severe.
The regimen of external circumstance and of
obligations contracted to others, is an aid
which only a strong man can dispense with
in the ordering of his days and hours ; and
moreover, if the course of the hours is to be
govismed wholly from within and pro re natd
as it were, there wiU be some danger of self-
government being accompanied by too much
of self-occupation.

Nor is it to be forgotten that the man who
lies under no external obligation (none that
is apparent and palpable) to occupy himself

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THE LIFE POETIC. 149

in one way or another, will become a prey to
many demands for small services, attentions
and civilities, such as will neither exercise
his faculties, add to his knowledge, nor leave
him to his thoughts. The prosecution of a
contemplative life is not an answer to any of
these demands; for though the man who is
in the pursuit of an active calling ia not
expected to give up his guineas for the sake
of affording some trifling gratification to some
friend or acquaintance or stranger, yet the
man who has renounced the active calling
and the guineas in order that he may possess
his soul in peace, is constantly expected to
give up his meditations, and no one counts
it for a sacrifice. Meditation, it is thought,
can always be done some other day. A man
without something indispensable to do, will
find his life to be involved in some of the
dilBftculties by which a woman's life is often
beset, one of which difllculties is the want of
a claim paramount upon her time. And
these difficulties will not be the less if the
poet have, as he ought to have, something

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150 THE LIFE POETIC.

of the woman in his nature ; — ^as he onght
to have, I aver; because the poet should be
hie a hcBc homo — ^the representative of human
nature at large and not of one sex only. With
the difficulties of a woman's life, the poet will
not find that any of its corresponding faci*
lities accrue ; he will find clahns to be made
upon him as upon a man, and no indemnities
granted to him as a poet. Thus it is that in
the bustling crowds of this present world, a
meditative man finds himself however pas-
sively disposed, in a position of oppugnancy
to those around him, and must struggle in
order to stand still.

But even if a poet devoted whoUy to re-
tirement, should be able to seclude himself
fi'om petty and unprofitable interruptions,
he would still be the better for methodising
his life by some severity of self-restraint.
Meditation is a wild business when there is
nothing else to be done. An excitable mind
wUl wander and waste itself if it be unen-
closed ; and nothing needs to be intermitted
more than the exercise of the imaginative

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THE LIFE POETIC. 151

feculties. I have heard a man of ardent
religious feelings declare that his devotions
were more lively and spiritual after a day of
business than in a day consecrated to devo-
tional exercises ; and in like manner it may
happen with a poet that there shall be more
freshness and vigour in the contemplations
which spring up after compression than in
those which are the predetermined occupation
of the day.

Next to conversancy with life and affairs,
a poet should cultivate a conversancy with
external nature. The cultivation, indeed,
will come of itself, if his life be led where
nature is favourably presented to him ; and
not where it is soiled and obscured, as in the
smoky parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, or
built out, as in great cities. If, however,
circumstances should oblige him to live in a
city, occasional visits to the country may still
do much for him — ^in some cases, perhaps,
even as much as constant residence. The
loss of continual intercourse with Nature is,
no doubt, a great loss to those who have an

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152 THE LIFE POETIC.

ever-flowing love and a never-failing admi-
ration of her ; which are, indeed, supreme
amongst poetical gifts: but on the other hand,
if there be some shortcomings in this kind,
the benefits of continual residence will bear
a less proportion to those of occasional inter-
course. What we see rarely is seen with an
access of enjoyment which quickens obser-
vation and brightens recollection; and if the
susceptibilities need to be stimulated, the
stimulation will redound more from what is
fresh than from what is familiar.

Mr. Tennyson has described — ^as he only
could — ^a sort of semi-seclusion, which would
seem to combine aU that a poet could want
to favour his intercourse with Nature and
with his kind :

• " Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love :
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock ;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream.
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar.

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THE LIFE POETIC. 153

Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge,
Crowned with the minster-towers." *

It must be acknowledged, however, that
the greatest English Poets of past times did
undoubtedly live much in London; and of
those, he who excelled most in the treatment
of external nature composed his best descrip-
tions from the images retained in his imagi-
nation when the knowledge of nature was at
one entrance quite shut out.

In our own times the greatest poets have
lived in the country ; but indeed they had
good reasons for doing so, independently of
intercourse with nature. For the social life
of cities is much changed from what it was
two hundred years ago. In London, in the
present times, an eminent man is beset with
a multiplicity of social enjoyments and excite-
ments, the very waste-pipes of genial sensi-
bility; and the poet's imagination, instead
of forming a fund to be continually deepened
and widened by influx from secret sources, is

* The Gardener's Daughter.
H 3

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154 THE LIFE POETIC.

diflftised and spread abroad and speedUy dried
up. Such, at least, is the case with those
eminent men who are lively in discourse or
cordial and courteous in demeanour. Others,
perhaps, invested with an adequate unpopu-
larity, may be in little danger. " Me, though
blind," says a poet who seems not to have
perceived the perils of social popularity till
they had passed by him, —

" Me, though blind,
God's mercy spared, from social snares with ease
Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please."

But social repulsiveness has its evils too,
when fdlly brought out in a metropolitan life :
the garb of hedgehog skins, though a coat of
proof, may be turned outside in, and not
worn with the equanimity with which that
sort of garment is said to have been worn by
the Saint. Whether, therefore, the poet be
socially unacceptable, or be courted, flattered
and caressed, but most in the latter case, Lon-
don, in these times, is not the place in which
his faculties will be most favourably developed.
And a due appreciation of the temptations

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THE LIFE POETIC. 155

to which a poet is exposed by popular admi-
ration and the courtings and wooings of
social life, may lead us to juster views than
are, I think, generally entertained of the ways
in which genius and art are to be cherished
by nations and governments. There is much
complaint made by the admirers of arts and
literature, that then- professors are not suffi-
ciently advanced and honoured by the State
and by mankind. In my estimation they are
honoured more than is good either for them-
selves or for their calling. Good for mankind
it may be to admn-e whatever is admirable
in genius or art ; but as to the poet himself,
a very moderate extent of favourable accept-
ance in his own times is all that can be
beneficial to him either as a man or as an
artist. He is by temperament but too exci-
table; with him the vita umhratUis is essential
to repose and self-possession ; and it is from
repose and self-possession, —

" Deep 8elf-pos8e8sion, an intense repose — "*
* Coleridge.

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156 THE LIFE POETIC.

that all genuine emanations of poetic genius
proceed. To the poet, solitude itself is an
excitement, into which none that is adventi-
tious should intrude : the voices which come
to him in solitude should not he mixed with
acclamations from without ; and the voices
which proceed from him should not he con-
founded hy the amiable intrusion of their
own echoes, apt, when quickly reverberated,
to be too intently listened for.

It is true that he must have some more or
less conscious anticipation of sympathy to
come ; he must feel that his voice will not be
as the voice of one crying in the desert, but
that his just thoughts, his glorious visions,
his passions, and ''the high reason of his
fancies,'' will, in their due time of maturity,
and after so many revolutions of the seasons
as are needful for the ripening of such results,
reach the hearts of multitudes, and find an
echo in the ages that are unborn. But these
anticipations of what is distant are not of a
nature to agitate or disturb the mind in its
self-communion. They serve to animate his

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THE LIFE POETIC. 157

lighter eflPorts, and they support him in his
severer labours and more strenuous studies ;
but they do not dissipate or distract the mind.
It is far otherwise in respect to contempora-
neous and immediate admiration; and I doubt
whether any high endeavour of poetic art
ever has been or ever will be promoted by
the stimulation of popular applause.

Still less would poetic art be advanced by
rewards in the shape of civil honours and
distinctions; and the proposals which have
been made for so rewarding it betray, when
they are examined, the inconsistency of the
views on which they are founded. It would
probably be admitted by their authors that
poetic art should not be accounted in any
respect inferior to military or political art.
Yet has any one entertained the notion of
assigning to the greatest poet of an age, civil
honours and distinctions tantamount to those
which are assigned to the greatest soldier or
poUtician ? The creation of a Duke of Rydal,
with an appanage of 10,000/. a year, is
not the sort of measure which has been

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158 THE LIFE POETIC.

suggested, and probably there is no one who
would not acknowledge it to be absurd. Yet
it could be hardly more absurd than the
assignment to our greatest poets, of titular
distinctions, which, being the highest that
are proposed as a reward of poetic genius, are
yet amongst the lowest that would be consi-
dered worthy the acceptance of a meritorious
general officer or a serviceable county mem-
ber. The truth is that civil honours and
titular distinctions are altogether unfit for
great poets; who, being but two or three in a
century, are to be distinguished by the rarity
of their kind.

With regard to pensions, were they intended
merely as honorary rewards, they would be
open to the same objections. If they were
supposed to have reference to the dignity of
the caUing, such pensions as are given to
Lord Chancellors and Ambassadors should
pitch the scale, rather than such as are given
to Clerks and Collectors of Customs. But
they are assigned upon different principles,
and their sufficiency is to be brought to

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THE LIFE POETIC. 159

another test. In treating of the life which a
poet ought to lead, I have left out of the
account one material question, — ^whether it
be such a life as it is likely that he will be
able to lead. And as there is no reason to
suppose him one of the few who are bom to
a competency, the renunciation which I have
recommended of all professional and com-
mercial pursuits, and also of all public em-
ployments except such as are casual and
temporary, may well suggest the inquiry in
what manner he is to be maintained? Not,
certainly, on the profits of poetry ; for unless
he apply himself merely to please and pam-
per and not to elevate or instruct, his poetry
will do little indeed towards procuring him
a subsistence ; it will probably not even yield
him such a return as would suflftce to support
a labouring man for one month out of the
twelve. This has been the case with the
greatest poets, if not during the whole, at
least during the greater part of their lives ;
and even when their poetry has attained to
what may be called popularity, it is still a

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160 THE LIFE POETIC.

popularity which extends only to the culti-
vated, as distinguished from the merely edu-
cated classes, and does not bring with it any
very profitable sale.

If poetry, then, be unavailable, will the poet
be enabled to subsist by the aid of prose? This
will probably be his best resource ; but even
prose will fail to return a profit, unless it be
written for the market. Having been almost
the only resource of one who was at once an
eminent poet and in general literature the
most distinguished writer of his age, Mr.
Southey, his example may be fairly adduced
as showing what can be made of it under the
most favourable circumstances. By a small
pension and the office of laureate (yielding
together about 200/. per annum), he was ena^
bled to insure his life, so as to make a
moderate posthumous provision for his family;
and it remained for him to support himself
and them, so long as he should live, by his
writings. With unrivalled industry, infinite
stores of knowledge, extraordinary talents, a
delightful style, and the devotion of about

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THE LIFE POETIC. 161

one-half of his time to writing what should
be marketable rather than what he would
have desired to write, he defrayed the cost of
that frugal and homely way of life which he
deemed to be the happiest and the best. So
far it may be said that all was well ; and cer-
tainly never was man more contented with a
humble lot than he. But at sixty years of
age he had never yet had one year's income
in advance; and when between sixty and
seventy his powers of writing failed, had it
not been for the timely grant of an additional
pension ,♦ his means of subsistence would
have failed too. It was owing to this grant
alone that the last years of a life of such
literary industry as was the wonder of his
time, were not harassed by pecuniary diffi-
culties; and at his death the melancholy
spectacle was presented, of enormous prepa-
rations thrown away, one great labour of his
life half-finished, and other lofty designs
which had been cherished in his heart of

♦ Through the care of Sir R. Peel.

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162 THE LIFE POETIC.

hearts from youth to age, either merely
inchoate or altogether unattempted.*

We momn over the lost books of Tacitus
and Pliny, and rake in the ruins of Hercu-
laneum to recover them ; but 300/. a-year —
had it been given in time — might have
realized for us works, over the loss of which
our posterity may perhaps mourn as much
or more !

" Things incomplete, and purposes betrayed.
Make sadder transits o'er Truth's mystic glass,
Than noblest objects utterly decayed." f

If one moiety of Mr. Southey's time — ^ap-
plied to procure, by marketable literature,
the means of subsistence — is found to leave
such miserable results as these, it may easily
be imagined what fortune would attend the
eflfbrts in marketable prose (always assuming

* I will allow myself to note here, whether or not it be to the
purpose, that the only son of the author of the Book of the
Church — a most active and exemplary clerg3rman with a large
family — ^is left (unavoidably perhaps, but the well-wishers of
the Church must surely wish that it could be avoided) to
struggle with the world, on a hard-working poverty-stricken
curacy. This he does, however, in a spirit of manly contented-
ness worthy of his father.

t Wordsworth.

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THE LIFE POETIC. 163

them, of course, to be good and worthy and
not the mere suppliance of the literary toy-
shop) of a man of like poetical gifts, but not
endowed with the same grace and facility in
composition, the same unwearied industry
and almost unexampled productiveness.

Pensions to poets, then, in such cases —
and, indeed, pensions to all writers, poetical
or other, in the higher and graver and there-
fore less popular and lucrative walks of
literature—may be deemed, I think, though
not appropriate as honours or rewards, yet
desu*able as providing a subsistence which
may not be attainable in other ways
without great injury to the interests of
literature. The provision should be suited
to the retired and homely way of life by
which the true dignity of a poet will be best
sustained and in which his genius will have
its least obstructed development; but it
should be a provision calculated — if pru-
dently managed — ^to make his life, in its
pecuniary elements, easy and untroubled. I
say "if prudently managed," because as to the

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164 THE LIFE POETIC.

wants of a spendthrift poet or of one who
is incompetent to the management of his
affairs, they are wants which it is hard to
measure and impossible to supply. If the
pensions now given to men of letters, to scien-
tific men, and to artists, be of such amount
as would enable them, living frugally, to give
all or most of their time, with an easy mind,
to those arts and pursuits by which they
may best consult the great and perdurable
interests committed by Providence to their
charge, then the amount is suflBicient,
though it be but little ; and the fact which
is so often brought forward, that it is
less than the ordinary emoluments of
trades, professions, or the humbler walks
of the pubUc service, is not material to the
case. If the pensions, on the other hand,
be of less amount than will effect this
purpose, then I think that the just ground
on which the grant of such pensions is to be
rested, — that is, the true interests of men of
genius themselves, and, through them, the
interests of literature and art, — ^require that

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THE LIFE POETIC. 165

they should be advanced in amount so &r
as may be sufficient for this purpose, and
no further.

It is not only to secure to him the undis-
turbed possession of his time and the undi-
verted direction of his endeavours, that it is
expedient to make some sufficient pecuniary
provision for a poet: such a provision is impor-
tant also as a safeguard to his character and
conduct ; for few indeed are the men whose
character and conduct are unimpaired by pecu-
niary difficulties ; and though wise men will
hardly be involved in such difficulties,let their
need be what it may, and though none but a
wise man can be a great poet, yet the wisdom
of the wisest may be weak in action ; it may
be infirm of purpose ; through emotions or
abstractions it may be accessible to one inroad
or another ; and though I am far fi*6m claim-
ing any peculiar indulgence for the infirmities
of men of genius — on the contrary in my
mind nothing can be more erroneous than to
extend indulgence to moral aberrations pre-
cisely in those cases in which, operating to

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160 THE LIFE POETIC.

the corruption of the greatest gifts, they are
the most malign and pernicious, — ^yet, jfor
this very reason, whilst refusing them any
indult or absolution, I would claim for men
of genius all needful protection — ^more per-
haps than ought to be needful — in order
that no danger that can be avoided may-
attend the great national and universal inte-
rests involved in their life and character.
For never let this truth depart from the
minds of poets or of those who would cherish
and protect them — ^that the poet and the man
are one and indivisible ; that as the life and
character is, so is the poetry ; that the poetry
is the fruit of the whole moral, spiritual,
intellectual and practical being ; and how-
soever in the imperfection of humanity,
ftilfilments may have fallen short of aspira-
tions and the lives of some illustrious poets
may have seemed to be at odds with greatness
and purity, yet in so far as the life has
faltered in wisdom and virtue, failing thereby
to be the nurse of high and pure imaginations,
the poet, we may be sure, has been shorn of

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THE LIFE POETIC. 167

his beams ; and whatsoever splendour may
remain to him, even though to our otherwise
bedarkened eyes wandering in a terrestrial
dimness, it may seem to be consummate and
the very " offspring of Heaven, first-bom," yet
it is a reduced splendour and a merely abor-
tive offspring as compared with what it might
have been, and with what it is in the bounty
of God to create, by the conjunction of the
like gifts of high reason, ardent imagination,
efflorescence of fancy and intrepidity of im-
pulse, with a heart subdued to Him and a
pure and unspotted life. Out of the heart
are the issues of life, and out of the life are
the issues of poetry.

And the greatest of those poets whose
Uves^ though perhaps less blemished in reality
than evil report would have them to be, are
certainly not fi^ee from reproach, have seen
and acknowledged all this, and have known
what they have lost. If the little that has
come down to us concerning Shakspeare
includes somewhat against him, we know
also from himself how it was by himself

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168 THE LIFE POETIC.

regarded; and what is to the present pur-
pose, we know that he unputed the evU
courses mto which he was betrayed to the
way of life forced upon him by the want of a
competency : —

" Oh, for my sake do thou with Fortune chide.
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds.

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.
And almost thence my nature is subdued

To that it works in, like the dyer's hand." *

And we know further, that when he had
attained to a competency (would that it had
been earUer!) he followed that way of life
no longer.

We have now plotted out for the poet a life,
contemplative but not inactive, orderly, dutiful,
observant, conversant with human affairs
and with nature; and though homely and
retired, yet easy as regards pecuniary circum-
stances. But some particulars remain to be
added. As his life of contemplation is to be
varied by practical activity upon occasion, so

* lllth Sonnet.

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THE LIFE POETIC. 169

should his solitude be varied by occasional
companionship. In youth his companions
will probably be chosen very much for the
sake of their intellectual powers and acquire-
ments; and whilst we are young we are most
open to cultivation from such companionship.
Afterwards, truth and kindness come to be,
if not all in all, yet at least of all quahties
the most essential ; and to one who, learning
from books what books can teach, would
desire to make more direct inquisition into
the secrets of human nature, it is far less
important that companionship should be in-
tellectual than that it should be confidential.
The poet being himself frank and unreserved,
(as I think poets for the most part will be
found to be), should beget frankness and
unreserve on the part of his companions, who
should come to him for advice and sympathy
in all the emergencies of life. "I have got
into this or that dilemma or diflftculty, what
am I to do ? " "I have fallen in love with
this or that young lady, what will becpine of
me ? " " I have been . ill-used and betrayed.

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170 THE LIFE POETIC.

shall I forgive it, or shall I resent it?" The
poet's companions, making hasty resort to
him under such circumstances, the inmost
thoughts of their hearts disclosed by the
passion of the time, whilst a friendly or per-
haps even an impassioned interest is excited
in the heart of the poet, the result thU be a
living knowledge, and a judgment, by as
much as it is responsibly and affectionately
exercised, by so much the more deeply culti-
vated. This is the companionship which,
being indeed essential to any one who would
bring out his better nature and fulfil his
duties as a man, is eminently essential to
a poet.

There is another companionship to be
considered, — ^that of books. The reading by
which Milton proposed to prepare himself to
write poetry was, as appears by a passage to
which I have already referred, *^8deet TesLd-
ing.'' In these times I thmk that a poet
should feed chiefly (not of coimse exclu-
sively) on the literature of the seventeenth
century. The diction and the movement

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THE LIFE POETIC. 171

of that literature, both in verse and in what
Dryden calls "that other harmony/' are, in
my apprehension, far more fitted than the
literature which has followed it, to be used
for the training of the mind to poetry.
There was no writing public nor reading
populace in that age. The age was the
worse for that, but the written style of the
age was the better. The writers were few
and intellectual; and they addressed them-
selves to learned, or, at least, to studious
and diligent readers. The structure of their
language is in itself an evidence that they
counted upon another frame of mind and a
different pace and speed in reading, from
that which can alone be looked to by the
writers of these days. Their books were not
written to be snatched up, run through,
talked over and forgotten ; and their diction,
therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste
and impatience, making everything so clear
that he who ran or flew might read. Rather
it was so constructed as to detain the reader
over what was pregnant and profound, and
I 2

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172 THE LIFE POETIC.

compel him to that brooding and prolific
posture of the mind, by which, if he had
wings, they might help him to some more
genial and profitable employment than that
of running like an ostrich through a desert.
And hence those characteristics of diction
by which these writers are made more
fit than those who have followed them
to train the ear and utterance of a poet.
For if we look at the long-suspended sen-
tences of those days, with all their convolu-
tions and intertextures — the many parts
waiting for the ultimate wholeness — we
shall perceive that without distinctive move-
ment and rhythmical significance of a very
high order, it would be impossible that they
could be sustained in any sort of clearness.
One of these writer's sentences is often in
itself a work of art, having its strophes and
antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls,
by which the reader, though conscious of
plural voices and running divisions of
thought, is not however permitted to disso-
ciate them fi-om their mutual concert and

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THE LIFE POETIC. 173

dependency, but required, on the contrary, to
give them entrance into his mind, opening it
wide enough for the purpose, as one com-
pacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences
thus elaborately constructed, and complex
though musical, are not easy to a remiss
reader, but they are clear and delightful to
an intent reader. Sentences, on the other
hand, such as are demanded in these times
by the reading commonalty, and written, by
those who aspire to be their representatives
in the republic of letters, lie under little
obligation to address themselves to the ear
of the mind. Sense is to be taken in by so
little at a time, that it matters not greatly
what sound goes with it ; or, at all events,
one movement and one tune, which all the
world understands, is as much as our sen-
tence can make room for or our reader will
take time for; and as matter and style will
ever re-act upon each other, I fear there is a
tendency in our popular writers to stop
short of that sort of matter to which brief
bright sentences are not appropriate and

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174 THE LIFE POETIC.

aJl-suflacient. However this be, the finer melo-
dies of language will always be found in
those compositions which deal with many
considerations at once— some principal, some
subordinate, some exceptional, some grada-
tional, some oppugnant ; and deal with them
compositely, by blending whilst they distin-
guish. And so much am I persuaded of the
connection between true intellectual harmony
of language and this kind of composition,
that I would rather seek for it in an Act of
Parliament — if any arduous matter of legis-
lation be in hand — ^than in the productions
of our popular writers, however lively and
forcible. An Act of Parliament, in such
subject-matter, is studiously written and
expects to be diligently read, and it generally
comprises compositions of the multiplex
character which has been described. It is a
kind of writing, therefore, to which some
species of rhythmical movement is indispen-
sable, as any one will find who attempts to
draft a difficult and comprehensive enact-
ment, with the omission of all the words

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THE LIFE POETIC. 175

which speak to the ear only and ore super-
fluous to the sense.

Let me not he misunderstood as presuming
to find fault generally and indiscriminately
with our modem manner of writing. It
may be adapted to its age and its purposes ;
whidi purposes, as bearing directly upon
hving multitudes, have a vastness and mo-
mentousness of their own. All that it con-
cerns me to aver is, that the purpose which
it will not answer is that of training the ear
of a poet to rhythmical melodies. And how
little it lends itself to any high order of
poetical purposes, may be judged by the
dreary results of every attempt which is
made to apply it to purposes of a cognate
character — ^to prayers, for example, and spi-
ritual exercises. Compare our modem com-
positions of this kind with the language of the
liturgy — ^a language which, though for the
most part short and ejaculatory and not de-
manding to be rhythmic in order to be under-
stood, partakes, nevertheless, in the highest
de^ee, of the musical expressiveness which

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176 THE LIFE POETIC.

pervaded the compositions of the time. Listen
to it in all its varieties of strain and cadence,
sudden or sustained, — now holding on in
assured strength, now smking in a soft con-
trition, and anon soaring in the joyfiilness of
faith— confession, absolution, exultation, each
to its appropriate music, and these again
contrasted with the steady statements of the
doxologies ; — ^Let us listen, I say, to this
language, which is one effiision of celestial
harmonies, and compare with it the flat and
uninspired tones and flagging movements of
those compounds of petition and exhortation
(from their length and multifariousness pe-
culiarly demanding rhythmic support) which
are to be found in modem collections of
prayers for the use of families. I think the
comparison will constrain us to acknowledge
that short sentences in long succession, how-
ever clear in construction and correct in
grammar, if they have no rhythmic impulse —
though they may very well deliver them-
selves of what the writer thinks and means
—will fail to bear in upon the mind' any

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THE LIFE POETIC. 177

adequate impression of what he feds — his
hopes and fears, his joy, his gratitude, his
compunction, his anguish and tribulation;
or, indeed, any assurance that he had not
merely framed a document of piety, in which
he had carefully set down whatever was
most proper to be said on the mornings and
evenings of each day. These compositions
have been, by an illustrious soldier, desig-
nated " fancy prayers," and this epithet may
be suitable to them in so far as they make
no account of authority and prescription;
but neither to the fancy nor to the imagina-
tion do they appeal through any utterance
which can charm the ear.

I come back, then, to the position that a
poet should make companions chiefly of those
writers who have written in the confidence
that their books would be learned and in-
wardly digested, and whose language was
fi:amed for patient and erudite ears and an
attitude of the mind like that in which St.
Paul listened to GamaUel, sitting at his feet
And I think that he should rather avoid any
I 3

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178 THE LIFE POETIC.

habitual resort to books, however delightful in
their kind, such as are written in these times
and for these times, to catch the ftigacious or
stimulate the sluggish reader ; books such as
may be read in the captiousness of haste by a
lawyer with an appointment to keep and a
watch on the table, or in an inapprehensive
weariness by a country gentleman after a day
of field sports.

Moreover, by this abstinence, and by a
conversancy with elder models in the matter
of diction, the poet will be enabled to employ
as his own, by the habit which is a second
nature, that slightly archaistic colouring of
language, which, being removed from what is
colloquial and familiar, at the same time that
it has no incongruity or unnatural strange-
ness, is, I think, in these times at least (as
by Spenser and others it was deemed to be
formerly also), the best costume in which
poetry can be clothed, combining what is
common to other ages with what is charac-
teristic of its own. At the same time the
true poet will be choice and chary, as well as

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THE LIFE POETIC. 179

moderate, in the use of archaisins; by no
means detaining or reviving old forms of
speech, which, being intrinsically bad» are in
away to be worthily forgotten. The wells
of English were not altogether undefiled in
9^7 age; and they who aspire to be what
poets ought to be, the conservators of lan-
guage, wiU proceed, not by obstructing the
expurgation of their mother tongue, — ^a pro-
cess which, as well as its corruption, is con-
tinually on foot, — ^but by remanding to their
more derivative significations, words which
are beginning to go astray, and by observing
with a keener insight the latent metaphorical
fitness or unfitness by which all language is
pervaded.

Nor is it to be supposed that the true poet
will betray his trust in the conservation of
his country's tongue, through any latitude
popularly permitted to him for convenience
of rhyme or rhythm. For whatever may be
meant by those who speak of poetical license,
that phrase would mislead us much, were we
to suppose that the language of poetry is not

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180 THE LIFE POETIC.

required to be precise for the most part, and
beyond all other language apt and discrimina^
tive. And though this peculiar aptitude will,
escape many of the poet's readers (if he have
many), and much of it will not be recognised
at once even by the more skilful few, yet in
this, as in other matters of art, it is what can
be fully appreciated only by continual study,
that will lay the strongest foundations of
fame. The " hsec placuit semel " should be,
to the poet, of infinitely less account than the
"hsec decies repetita placebit: " nor is he
worthy of the name of a poet who would not
rather be read a hundred times by one reader
than once by a hundred.

When that great man of whom I have
already made mention, speaks of his life as
led in his library and with his books, those to
which he adverts as his never-failing Mends,
are the books of other times ; and a poet's
feelings as to this companionship could not be
more expressively conveyed than in the verses
in which he has given them utterance : —

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THE LIFE POETIC. 181

" My days among the dead are past,

Around me I behold
Where'er these casual eyes are cast,

The mighty minds of old ;
My never-failing friends are they.
With whom I converse day by day.

''With them I take delight in weal, .

And seek relief in woe ;
And while I understand and feel

How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedewed
With tears of thoughtful gratitude.

" My thoughts are with the dead : with them

I live in long past years ;
Their virtues love, their faults condemn,

Partake their hopes and fears ;
And from their lessons, seek and find
Instruction with an humble mind.

" My hopes are with the dead. Anon

My place with them will be ;
And I with them shall travel on

Through all eternity ;
Yet leaving here a name, I trust.
That will not perish in the dust."

With regard to the habitual reading of books
in foreign languages, whether living lan-
guages or other, I, being but very imperfectly
acquainted with any but my own, am not

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182 THE LIFE POETIC.

competent to say what would be the effect of
it upon a poet's diction and numbers; but
this subject is one which would deserve to be
investigated by some duly qualified critic.
Milton, I think, though he greatly enriched
his store of poetical images and materials by
his conversancy with Latin, Greek, and Italian
books, did yet suffer iiyury on the other hand
in the perverting of his diction to the Latin ;
his numbers, however, (for numbers are less
than diction accessible to foreign influence),
remaining unwarped and eminently his
country's and his own. Dante had no indi-
genous literature to assist him in the mould-
ing of his verse, being himself the founder of
the Italian as a literate language; and he
rebukes, with some severity of disdain, those
who were " tam obsoense rationis,'' as to mag-
nify the language of their native country
above every other. "For myself," he says,
" whose country is the world, being native to
that as the fish to the sea, though I drank the
waters of the Amo before I had a tooth in my
head, and have so loved Florence as, by reason

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THE LIFE POETIC. 183

of my love, to undergo an unjust banishment,
yet have I holden my judgment subject to my
reason rather than to my senses ; and as to
Florence whence I am sprung, regard it
though I may as the place in the world most
pleasant to me, yet when I revolve the works
of the poets and other writers by whom the
world has been described in all its particulars
from pole to pole, I am strong and absolute
in the opinion, derived from other evidence
than that of the senses, that there are regions
and cities more delightful and noble than
those of Tuscany, and languages better both
for their use and their charm than the
Latian."*

* '' Nam quicunqne tarn obscensB rationis est ut locnm sua
nationis deliciosissimum credat esse sub sole^ hnic etiam proe
cnnctis proprinm vnlgare licebit, id est matemam locutionem,
prsBponere : . . . . Nos autem, cui mundns est patria velut
piscibus ffiqnor, quamqaam Samnm bib^rimus ante dentes, et
Florentiam adeo diligamus nt^ quia dileximus^ exilinm patiamnr
injnste, ratione magis qnam sensu spatnlas nostri judicii podia-
miis : et qnamvis ad volnptatem nostram, sive nostrsB sensnali-
tatis qnietem, in terris amoenior locns quam Florentia non existat^
revolyentes et poetarum, et aliomm scriptonun yolumina^ qaibns
mundus nniversaliter et membratim describitnr^ ratiocinantesqne
in nobis sitnationes varias mundi locomm et eorum habitndinem

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It would be matter of much interest to know
from competent critics, how far the operation
of these sentiments is to be traced in the fabric
of Dante's verse, he having had, as it were, to
build it up from the ground ; or how far the
native genius of, the language has ruled
supreme. If Milton, however, have accepted
foreign aid, and perhaps Dante also, yet
Shakespeare is a, signal example of the all-
sufficiency of national resources; having, with
his "small Latin and less Greek," so large
and various a vocabulary, it hardly seems
possible that any extent of erudition could
have bettered it, and a structure of language
so flexible and multiform, that it could not
have been more so had there been a con-
fluence of twenty tributary tongues at its
formation.

ad ntrnmqne polnm et circnlnm seqnatorem, multas esse perpen-
dimns firmiterqne censemns, et magis nobiles et magis deliciosas
et regiones et urbes, qoam Thnsciam et Florentiam, nnde snm
oiiundns et civis, et plerasqne nationes et gentes delectabiliori
atqne ntiliori sermone nti, qnam.Latinos." — De Vulgari Eloquio,
1 — 6. I extract the passage, because in translatiiig I have
abridged it.

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THE LIFE POETIC. 185

Having considered, if not sufficiently, yet at
sufficient length, after what manner a poet is
to live, it may be well, before I conclude, to
inquire at what period of his life he should
deem himself to be prepared for the exercise
of his vocation on a large scale. And from
the nature of some of the preparations which
have been treated of as indispensable, it will
plainly appear that this period will not arrive
in early youth. For if contemplation, action,
conversancy with life and affairs, varied duties,
much solitude in its turn, with observation of
Nature, and reading select and severe if not
extensive, be, as I have deemed them to be,
essential requisites for the writing of poetry
in its higher and graver kinds, some not
inconsiderable tract of matured life must
have been travelled through before these fruits
can have been gathered. And with this hypo-
thesis our literary history and biography will
be found to accord. Milton, at twenty-three
years of age, thought that he ripened slowly ;
and when he supposed himself less happy in
that respect than others, doubtless it was

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186 THE LIFE POKnC*

because his own deficiencies were better
known to him than theirs : —

*' How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen, on his wing, my three-and-twentieth year.
My hasting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I towards manhood am airived so near.
And inward ripeness doth much less appear.

Than some more timely happy spirits indueth."

Even in his twenty-ninth year he regarded
his poetical efforts (and comparing himself
with himself, perhaps we may say with rea-
son,) as a plucking of the '' berries harsh and
crude/* But the history of poetry at large
would show, I think, that Milton's poetical
faculties were not of slower growth than
those of other poets of the high and intellec-
tual orders ; and that at all events the period
of the culmination of such poets is in middle
life. And with regard to exceptional cases
— ^instances of high achievement at other
periods^ — ^whilst a few may be cited as be-
longing to the periods short of middle life,
more illustrious examples still will be found

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THB LIFE POETia 187

belonging to periods beyond it. Pope wrote
verses with singular grace and dexterity in
his early youth: but, on the other hand,
Dryden, when he produced the •* Alexander's
Feast," was in his sixty-seventh year; and "are
not the gleanings of the grapes of Ephraim
better than the vintage of Abiezer?** Groethe
may be quoted as an authority as well as an
example. When the poet, in the Prologue
to the Faust, sighs alter his lost youth, his
friend reproves him, and whilst admitting
that youth is propitious to divers other ends
and exercises, declares that, for the purposes
of poetry, the elder is the better man : —

'' The cunning hand of art to fling
With spirit o'er the accustom'd string ;
To seem to wander, yet to bend
Each motion to the harmonious end :
Such is the task our ripened age imposes,
Which makes our day more glorious ere it closes." ♦

Nor is it only the poetry of the highest
intellectual order which is better written

* Lord F. Egerton's translation.

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188 THE LIFE POETIC.

after youth than in youth. Even for amorous
poetry, there is a richer vein than that of
youth's temperament, and a more attractive
art than youth can attain to. Let the mas-
ters of erotic verse be mustered, and it will
appear, I think, that few or none of them
wrote consummately in early youth, whilst
the best of them gave utterance to their best
strains long after they had sung their " Viad
PtieUis.'" The sense of proportion, which is
required equally in the lighter as in the
graver kinds of poetry, is naturally imperfect
in youth, through undue ardour in particu-
lars ; and no very young poet wiU be content
to sacrifice special felicities to general effect.
Nor can there well exist, at an early period
of life, that rare and peculiar balance of all
the faculties, which, even more perhaps
than a peculiar force in any, constitutes a
great poet: — ^the balance of reason with
imagination, passion with self-possession,
abundance with reserve, and inventive con-
ception with executive ability.
On the whole, therefore, it is not desirable

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THE LIFE POETIC. 189

that a poet should prosecute any great en-
terprise in early youth ; nor is it likely that
his lighter efforts will be worth much.
Nevertheless, it is the period for practice and
exercise; and a poet must and will write
much verse in youth, and he will be much
the better for it; nor will he write it with the
purpose of throwing it away. If he be
affected with the usual impatience of an
ardent temperament in early life, it will
perhaps be best for him to publish; for till he
have rid himself of this impatience, he will not
go to work with an ambition sufficiently long-
sighted and a steady preference of ulterior
to early results. And publication, if unsuc-
cessful, (as the juvenile publications of great
poets are almost sure to be), is a sedative of
much virtue and efficacy in such cases. ** Be
not ambitious of an early fame,'* says Mr.
Landor, " for such is apt to shrivel and drop
under the tree.'' Early success puts an end
to severe study and strenuous endeavour;
whereas early failure in those in whom there

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190 THE LIFE POETIC.

is genuine poetic genius, and what commonly
accompanies it —

** Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse — "*

acts as a sort of narcotic stimulant, allaying
impatience, but quickening the deeper mind.
The outset of a poet's life, and the conduct
of it " nd mezzo del cammin '' — ^the seasons in
which his poetry is sown and reaped — ^are
most important to the interests of the art
and of mankind. The manner in which it
shall be drawn to a dose, may be supposed
to be important chiefly to the poet himself:
yet it is not altogether so ; and a few words
may not be wasted in speaking of that latter
autumn of a poet's life which succeeds his
harvest-home. With poets whose life reaches
its three-score-years^and-ten, this wiU be a
period of some years' duration. For the fact
that by some great poets some short poetical
efforts have been hazarded in old age with
eminent success, should not certainly lead

* Wordsworth.

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THE LIFE POETIC. 191

to the conclusion that an old man should
occupy himself in adding to the bulk of his
poetical works, (especially if already volumi-
nous), when he can no longer hope to en-
hance their rateable and specific value. It
is important to every poet to keep his works
within compass. Moreover, the intensities
of life should be allowed to come to their
natural close some steps short of the grave ;
and passionate writing should not be ex-
tended over this period, even if the imagina^
tion have not ceased to be impassioned
There are other ways, at once congenial with
the poetic life and consentaneous with its
decline, in which the activities that remain
may be gently exercised, when the passion
has been laid to rest The long education of
a poet's life (for as long as he lives he should
learn) will have enabled him to detect, at the
end of it, many faults in his writings which
he knew not of before; and thore will be
many faults, also, of which he vim cognisant,
but which, in the eagerness of his productive

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192 THE LIFE POETIC.

years, he had not found leisure or mclination
to amend. In his old age, as long as the
judgment and the executive power over
details shall be unimpaired, — ^as long as the
hand shall not have lost its cunning, — ^the
work of correction may be carried on to
completeness, and the poef s house be put
in order. Some caution will be requisite.
Age is prone to fastidiousness; and if the
poet can no longer go along with the ardours
of his younger years, he should take care
lest he quench them with too cold a touch.
Age, too, is vacillating ; and if he have lost
his clearness and decisiveness of choice, he
should not deal with any delinquencies of
his younger verse except those which are
flagrant; and in all his corrections, indeed,
the presumption should be in favour of the
first draft, which should have the benefit of
the doubt if there be one; otherwise the
works may be the worse for the last hand.
But, subject to these conditions, there seems
to be no employment better suited to the old

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THE LIFE POETIC. 193

age of a poet, than that of purifying and
making less perishable that which he trusts
may be the earthly representative of his im-
mortal part. For such purpose and in so
far forth, he may permit himself even at a
period when "the last infirmity" should be
on its last legs, to be occupied with himself
and his fame. But when his own works are
as he would wish to leave them, nothing of
that which is peculiar to him as a poet and
not common to him as a man, will so well
become his latter days, as to look beyond
himself and have regard to the future for-
tunes of his art involved in the rising gene-
ration of poets. It should be his desire and
his joy to cherish the lights by which his
own shall be succeeded, and, perhaps, out-
shone. The personal influence of an old
poet upon a young one — youth and age
being harmonised by the sympathies of the
art — ^may do what no writings can, to mould
those spirits by which, hereafter, many are
to be moulded ; and as the reflex of a glorious

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194 THE LIFE POETIC

sunset will sometimes tinge the eastern sky,
the declining poet may communicate to
those who are to come after him, not guidance
only, but the very colours of his genius,
the temper of his moral mind, and the in*
spiration of his hopes and promises. That
done, or ceasing to be practicable through
efllux of light, it will only remain for the
poet to wait in patience and peace,

" While night
Invests the sea, and wished mom delays." *

* Paradise Lost.

THE END.

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II I I 111 juiwii I if fzaiBUir tr »^nr wir-;^ n }r- ;rT>« w n
CHaBBDODoB: SCI ~ ]xn» v>* ]rA::a>'^ it iibi'«» li^ xr«*« n

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1 lesii^x^iiaae n far maam*r^ *i \i^ -mcu-r

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GRANT'S NESTORIAN CHRISTIANS, OR LOST TRIBES.

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POETRY, THE DRAMA, &c.

LORD BYRON'S LIFE AND WORKS.

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LORD BYRON'S TALES.

With Vignettes. S yols. 24mo, 5/.

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LORD BYRON'S CHILDE HAROLD.

With Vignettes. 2imo»is.6d,

LORD BYRON'S MISCELLANIES.

With Vignettesw 3 yoU. 24mo, 7s. 60,

LORD BYRON'S DON JUAN.

With Vignettes. 2 yols. 24mo. ^.

O Ma. MnaiUT akoe possesses the CSopyright of Lora Bykon's Works, and no
edition, illustrated or otherwise, can be oomflxtx except it bears his name on the
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CRABBE'S LIFE AND POETICAL WORKS.

With plates. 8 vols, foap 8yo, 30«.

CRABBE'S LIFE AND POEMS.

With Portrait and Vignette. Complete in one yolume, royal 8yo, lfi«.

CAMPBELL'S SPECIMENS OF THE POETS.

Portrait. Complete in one yolmne^ royal Svo, Ifif .

BISHOP HEBER'S POETICAL WORKS.

Portrait Foap 8yo, 7«* 6d.
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3 vols, foap 8yo, 18i,

ALLAN CUNNINGHAM'S POEMS AND SONGS.

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POPULAR VOYAGES AND TRAVELS,

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LADY SALE'S JOURNAL IN AFFGHANISTAN.

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XIIT.

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LYELL'S TRAVELS IN NORTH AMERICA.

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' MRS. HOUSTOUN'S YACHT VOYAGE TO TEXAS.

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ZIZ.

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VENABLES' DOMESTIC MINERS OF THE RUSSIANS.

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DENNIS' CITIES AND CEMETERIES OF ETRURIA.
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BARROW'S TOUR IN LOMBARDY AND THE TYROL.

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GENERAL LITERATURE.

SIR JAMES CLARK ON CLIMATE.

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HALLAM'S LITERARy'hISTORY OF EUROPE.

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Seventh Edition. Fcap Bvo, U.

ABERCROMBIE ON THE ^INTELLECTUAL POWERS.

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TALBOT ON ENGLISH ETYMOLOGIES.

8ro. 12s,

SHAW'S OUTLINES OF^'eNGLISH LITERATURE.

For Colleges and Schools. PostSvo.

VII.

REMARKABLE GERMAN CRIMES AND TRIALS.

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JESSE'S VISITS TO SPOTS OF INTEREST

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THE EMIGRANT.
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THE FAMILY ARABIAN NIGHTS.

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HAWKSTONE :
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RICARDO'S POLITICAL WORKS.

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ILLUSTRATED WORKS.

THE ILLUMINATED COMMON PRAYER BOOK,

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LOCKHART'S ANCIENT SPANISH BALLADS.

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in.

LORD BYRON'S CHILDE HAROLD.

With a FoHrait and 60 Vignette EngraTings. Svo, Sl#.
•*A tpUniid work— worth Uluetrating, and wortkUy iUuetrated,"'~ArKsnMVU.

iESOP's'^FABLES.

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OTTO SPECKTER'S PUSS IN BOOTS.

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OTTO SPECKTER'S CHARMED ROE.

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THE FAIRY RING.

Tales and Stories for Young Persons. Illustrated by Richard Dotlh.

Second Edition, Foap 8to, 7«* 6d.

SPORTINQs

NIMROD ON THE CHASE— THE TURP— AND THE ROAD.
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SCROPE'S DAYS OF DEER-STALKING.

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SCBOPE'S DAYS AND NIGHTS OF SALMON FISHING.

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PENN'S MAXIMS AND HINTS ON ANGLING, &c.
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COLQUHOUN ON THE MOOR AND THE LOCH ;
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ART, SCIENCE, AND NATURAL HISTORY.

SIR CHARLES BELL ON EXPRESSION.

Fourth Edition. With Plates. Impl. 8vo, 21«.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LITERATURE OF ART.

By C. L. Eabtlakb, R. A. Sto. 1S«.
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ANCIENT PAINTING IN OIL AND ON GLASS.

With Introductions and Notes by Mas. Mkrrifibld. 2 yols. 8vo.

THE ARTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

By the Monk Thjpophilub. Translated, with Notes, by Robsrt Hbhsius. 8vo. 2U.

LORD LINDSAY'S SKETCHES OF CHRISTIAN ART.

3 vols. 8¥0, 3U. 6d.

HISTORY OF PAINTING.*

ITALIAN, GERMAN, FLEMISH, DUTCH, SPANISH ft FRENCH SCHOOLS.
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SOMERVILLE ON THE* PHYSICAL SCIENCES.

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SOMERVILLE ON PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.

Portrait, 2 vols. Fcap. 8to.

FARADAY'S CHEMICAL MANIPULATION.

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BABBAGE ON MACHINERY AND MANUFACTURES.

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LYELL'S PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.

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JESSE'S GLEANINGS IN NATURAL HISTORY.

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MRS. LOUDON'S NATURAL SYSTEM OF PLANTS.

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DOMESTIC AND RURAL ECONOMY.

MRS. RUNDELL'S DOMESTIC COOKERY.

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THE FAMILY RECEIPT-BOOK;

New Edition. Foap 8vo, 5s. Bd.
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MRS. LOUDON'S GARDENING FOR LADIES ;

With Pbactical Instructjons and Dirbctionh for bvbry Month in the Ybjju
8txth Edition. Woodcuts. Foap 8vo, 6f.
" Ought to find its way into every cottage in the country."— J^/af,
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FARMING FOR LADIES;

A GUIDE FOR THE POULTRY-YARD. DAIRY, AND PIGGERY.

Woodcuts. Fcap 8vo, 8s,
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HAND-BOOK Of""' NEEDLEWORK ;

A Guide to OYory kind of Decorative Needlework, Crochet, Knitting, and Netting.
ByMissLAMBKRT. Fifth Edition. ISO Woodcuts. Fcap 8vo. 6f . 6d.
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MY CROCHET SAMPLER.

By MiB& Lambbbt. First and Second Series. Woodcuts. )emo,4«.
m.

MY KNITTING-BOOK.

By Bfiss Lambbbt. First and Second Series. 16mo» Is. 6d, each.

CHURCH NEEDLEWORK ;

With Remarks on its Preparation and Arrangement. By Miss Lambbbt. With
nnmerousBngravingai Post 8vo, 9«. 6(i.

HINTS ON DECORATIVE NEEDLEWORK,

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WORKS ADAPTED FOR YOUNG PERSONS.

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

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46th Thoutand. Woodcuts. 12mo> 7«. 6d.

HISTORY OF FRANCE.

From the Conquest by the Oauls, to the Reign of Louis Philippe.
20tA Thaiuand. Woodcuts. 12mo» 7'* 6d.

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HISTORY OF GERMANY.

From the Invasion by Marius, to the Battle of Leipsio.
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HISTORY OF ROME AND GREECE.

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MRS. MABKHAM'S SERMONS FOR CHILDREN.

Second Edition, Foap Svo, 3s.

BERTHA'S VISIT TO HER UNCLE IN ENGLAND.

lOth Thousand, ISmo, 7«* 64.

PHILOSOPHY IN SPORT MADE SCIENCE IN EARNEST.

Sixth Edition, With 100 Woodcuts. Fcap 8yo, 8s.
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CROKER'S GEOGRAPHY FOR CHILDREN.

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lilTTLB ARTHUR'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

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FISHER'S ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY AND ALGEBRA.

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SMITH'S DICTIONARY OF GR. AND ROM. ANTIQUITIES.

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SMITH'S SCHOOL DICTIONARY OF ANTIQUITIES.

Abridged from the aboTO work. Woodcuts. 12mo> 10«. 6d.
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SMITH'S GR. AND ROM. BIOGRAPHY AND MYTHOLOGY.

Tola. 1 ft 8. 8yo. 36s, each. ( To be completed in 3 vote.)

IT.

MITCHELL'S PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES.

8to. Clouds, 10«.— 8. Fboos, Ifif.

T.

PEILE'S iESCHYLUS,

The AoAMBif NON and Chobphoius. Second Edition, Bro, 9«. each.

TI.

BUTTMAN'S LEXILOGUS ;

Translated, with Notes, by Fishlaks. Third Edition. Svo, lis.
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BUTTMAN'S IRREGULAR GREEK VERBS ;

Translated, with Notes, by Fishlaks. Second Edition. 8yo, 7*» <M*
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CARMICHAEL'S GREEK VERBS :

Their Formations, Irregularities, and Defects. Second Edition, 19mo, 8#. (fcL

iz.

COLERIDGES GREEK CLASSIC POETS.

Third Edition. Foap 8to, &# . 6<i.

EASE'S ANCIENT GREEKS.

Translatsd from the Osrmah. Foap. 8vo, 6s. 6d.
zi.

MATTHIJE'S SHORTER GREEK GRAMMAR.

Abridged by the Bishop or Lonooh. Seventh Edition. Revised byEnwAiuw. UmOySf-

ZIL

KING EDWARD THE SIXTH'S LATIN GRAMMAR.

A New Edition revised. ISmo, Zs, 9d,

XIII.

ENGLISH NOTES TOR LATIN ELEGIACS.
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